Newsweekhttp://www.newsweek.com
Latest NewsenPopular Kids Are More Likely to Be Bullied, Study Claimshttp://www.newsweek.com/popular-kids-are-more-likely-be-bullied-study-claims-239125
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-73e4b37c-1f1a-82bf-31f9-fc0f31b89ddb">A new sociological study finds that the likelihood of being bullied is higher for more popular students, with the exception of those at the “top five percent of the school’s social strata.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-73e4b37c-1f1a-82bf-31f9-fc0f31b89ddb">Published in the </span><em>American Sociological Review</em>, the study says that young people aiming to improve their social status may also be improving their risk of being bullied. The researchers looked at friendship networks at 19 schools in North Carolina.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-73e4b37c-1f1a-82bf-31f9-fc0f31b89ddb">“We did find that students who are isolated do get bullied,” co-author Diane Felmlee, a professor of sociology at Penn State, says in a </span><a href="http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-04/ps-btp033114.php" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">press release</a>. “However, for most students, the likelihood of being targeted by aggressive acts increases as a student becomes more popular, with the exception of those at the very top.”</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-73e4b37c-1f1a-82bf-31f9-fc0f31b89ddb">“Peer status not only fails to protect students from several harmful outcomes associated with becoming a victim of aggression, but it appears to heighten them,” the researchers write in their conclusion.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-73e4b37c-1f1a-82bf-31f9-fc0f31b89ddb">The study notes that aggressors do attack the weak, but “not as often as they attack the strong.” It also identifies factors that protect students from bullying, including having an “aggressive friend” or having multiple cross-gender friends in a school where that isn’t common.</span></p><p dir="ltr">Finally—and perhaps unsurprisingly—Felmlee’s research found that girls are more likely to be victimized by aggressors of both genders, and girls who date are especially likely targets for physical aggression.</p><p><span id="docs-internal-guid-73e4b37c-1f1a-82bf-31f9-fc0f31b89ddb">That disparity can clearly be attributed to the “greater institutional and cultural prestige enjoyed by males, whose activities are celebrated to a much greater extent in most schools,” the study says.</span></p>http://www.newsweek.com/popular-kids-are-more-likely-be-bullied-study-claims-239125Tue, 01 Apr 2014 17:06:28 -0400Why Accepted Students Should Ask Colleges About Sexual Assaulthttp://www.newsweek.com/why-accepted-students-should-ask-colleges-about-sexual-assault-239106
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-e947b649-1ed8-a7b1-f242-f23b9f68e6ac">Last Thursday, several thousand high schoolers </span><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/ivy-league-acceptance-2018-2014-3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">went online to learn they’d been admitted</a> to Dartmouth, Harvard and other top Ivy League colleges.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-e947b649-1ed8-a7b1-f242-f23b9f68e6ac">This month, as they weigh the academic programs, campus offerings and financial packages of the schools offering them admission, those 18-year-olds might reasonably consider another metric: how the school in question handles—or mishandles—cases of sexual violence on campus.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-e947b649-1ed8-a7b1-f242-f23b9f68e6ac">Consider Dartmouth. As it woos members of the Class of 2018, the school is considering a significant overhaul of its student disciplinary policy for sexual assault. The college tweeted as much, in between breathless missives to the incoming class and images of an admissions dean signing acceptance letters:</span></p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en" xml:lang="en"><p>At Dartmouth, we are taking action on sexual assault: expulsion mandatory for cases of rape. Read more at: <a href="http://t.co/DonFRrhHPQ" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://t.co/DonFRrhHPQ</a></p>— Dartmouth (@dartmouth) <a href="https://twitter.com/dartmouth/statuses/448926799154913281">March 26, 2014</a></blockquote><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-e947b649-1ed9-31ee-1d8f-fd8a735f8759">The linked statement </span><a href="http://www.dartmouth.edu/~opa/statements/sa031814.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">explains</a> that the school’s Board of Trustees has endorsed a proposal implementing:</p><blockquote><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-e947b649-1ed9-31ee-1d8f-fd8a735f8759">Mandatory expulsion in cases involving penetration accomplished by force, threat, or purposeful incapacitation or where an assault involving penetration is motivated by bias;</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-e947b649-1ed9-31ee-1d8f-fd8a735f8759">Mandatory expulsion where the charged student has previously been found responsible for sexual assault; and</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-e947b649-1ed9-31ee-1d8f-fd8a735f8759">In other cases involving penetration, a strong presumption in favor of expulsion.</span></p></blockquote><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-e947b649-1ed9-31ee-1d8f-fd8a735f8759">“The proposed tougher sanctions of mandatory expulsion in the most egregious cases and the adoption of a new external investigatory process have been submitted to campus community comment, which ends on the 14th,” Tommy Bruce, the school’s senior vice president for public affairs, wrote in an email to </span><em>Newsweek</em>. “The new rules are expected to go into effect this coming June, pending the outcome of the public review.”</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-e947b649-1ed9-31ee-1d8f-fd8a735f8759">The timing isn’t a coincidence. The same day acceptance letters went out to the Class of 2018, Parker Gilbert, a member of the Class of 2016 whose grandfather was a professor at the school, was </span><a href="http://thedartmouth.com/2014/03/28/news/parker-gilbert-16-found-not-guilty-of-rape" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">found not guilty of rape</a> after a tense two-week trial. The 19-year-old complainant alleged that she woke up to find Parker raping her in May 2013. Gilbert described the encounter as a consensual form of “drunken, awkward, college sex.” As Jezebel <a href="http://jezebel.com/dartmouth-wants-to-make-it-clear-theyre-taking-sexual-1553069458" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">notes</a>, the trial came after a particularly fraught year for sexual violence on the New Hampshire campus:</p><blockquote><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-e947b649-1ed9-31ee-1d8f-fd8a735f8759">it came to trial as an exceedingly bright spotlight was already shining on the school following the announcement last spring that they were being </span><a href="http://thedartmouth.com/2014/01/21/news/title-ix-investigators-to-visit-campus-next-week" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">investigated</a> by the Department of Education for Title IX violations. They're also dealing with the fall-out from <a href="http://jezebel.com/dartmouth-student-encourages-rape-of-classmate-on-anony-1518380538" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">a post</a> on the campus website Bored at Baker that encouraged the rape of one of their students a few months ago. (An op-ed on The Dartmouth <a href="http://thedartmouth.com/2014/03/25/opinion/gil-the-shame-game" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">suggests</a> that there was plenty of vitriol towards the Gilbert's accuser posted on Bored at Baker as well.)</p></blockquote><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-e947b649-1ed9-31ee-1d8f-fd8a735f8759">Columbia has weathered </span><a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/178287/sexual-assault-policies-under-fire-columbia" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">questions about its own sexual assault policy</a> in recent weeks. So has Harvard. On Monday, <em>The Harvard Crimson</em> published a <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2014/3/31/Harvard-sexual-assault/?page=single" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">lengthy op-ed by an assault survivor</a>, who details the bureaucratic indifference—and antiquated sexual assault criteria—she faced while living in the same residential house as her assailant. It is not an easy read:</p><blockquote><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-e947b649-1ed9-31ee-1d8f-fd8a735f8759">Dear Harvard: I am writing to let you know that I give up. I will be moving out of my House next semester, if only—quite literally—to save my life. You will no longer receive emails from me, asking for something to be done, pleading for someone to hear me, explaining how my grades are melting and how I have developed a mental illness as a result of your inaction. My assailant will remain unpunished, and life on this campus will continue its course as if nothing had happened. Today, Harvard, I am writing to let you know that you have won.</span></p></blockquote><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-e947b649-1ed9-31ee-1d8f-fd8a735f8759">“The school’s limited response amounted to the equivalent of a slap on the hand for my assailant,” the unnamed student writes. “After unsuccessfully suggesting a number of interventions that could have helped me better live with my situation, I eventually got the persistent impression that my House staff believed I was fussing over nothing.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-e947b649-1ed9-31ee-1d8f-fd8a735f8759">Harvard hasn’t responded to a request for comment.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-e947b649-1ed9-31ee-1d8f-fd8a735f8759">April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. It’s also the month for accepted students to decide where to matriculate—to select the campus where, if they are female, they have </span><a href="http://www.slc.edu/offices-services/security/assault/statistics.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">a 25 percent chance of being sexually assaulted</a> before graduation.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-e947b649-1ed9-31ee-1d8f-fd8a735f8759">They will spend the month chatting with current students, visiting and revisiting the campus and asking admissions reps about faculty, intramurals, core curricula and frosh dorms.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-e947b649-1ed9-31ee-1d8f-fd8a735f8759">They should also ask about rape on campus—and what the school is doing to halt it. At some of the most prestigious campuses in the country, the answer is: not nearly enough.</span></p><div> </div>http://www.newsweek.com/why-accepted-students-should-ask-colleges-about-sexual-assault-239106Tue, 01 Apr 2014 16:20:32 -0400Seeing Value in 'Gap Years,' Tufts University Offers to Payhttp://www.newsweek.com/seeing-value-gap-years-tufts-university-offers-pay-231998
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-30f1bfb9-c2ab-91bb-05e3-105c7db8806e">When Gregory Kristoff graduated high school in 2010, he opted not to start college immediately. Instead, he </span><a href="http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/on-the-ground-with-a-gap-year/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">spent the better part of a year</a> studying Chinese in Beijing and then Dalian, China. Then he went to Peru — and then, after a full year of such gallivanting, he began his freshman year at Harvard.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-30f1bfb9-c2ab-91bb-05e3-105c7db8806e">It’s probably not a coincidence that his father, the </span><em>New York Times</em> columnist Nicholas Kristof, is a particularly vocal proponent of what are commonly called gap years, having written several columns encouraging the practice.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-30f1bfb9-c2ab-91bb-05e3-105c7db8806e">“I think that students need sabbaticals at least as much as professors,” Kristof told </span><em>Newsweek</em>. “I think if more universities encourage gap years, then probably fewer freshmen would spend their first month in college in an alcoholic haze.”</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-30f1bfb9-c2ab-91bb-05e3-105c7db8806e">Except the barrier, in some cases, is cost. In an initiative intended to make that option accessible for students from low- and middle-income backgrounds, Tufts University has announced a new program offering to fund housing, travel, and other fees. </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-30f1bfb9-c2ab-91bb-05e3-105c7db8806e">Announced in February, the option will be available to students entering in the fall of 2015 — and </span><a href="http://bigstory.ap.org/article/college-offers-pay-students-take-year" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">according to the Associated Press</a>, it isn’t the first of its kind. Similar programs have already gone into effect at Princeton, The University of North Carolina, and St. Norbert College in Wisconsin.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-30f1bfb9-c2ab-91bb-05e3-105c7db8806e">The goal is to encourage needier students to take part in a tradition, long popular in Europe, that experts say makes for more motivated, mature, and worldly students as they adjust to life in college.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-30f1bfb9-c2ab-91bb-05e3-105c7db8806e">“It's about providing an experience that up until now has been largely confined to students from more economically privileged backgrounds,” said Director of Public Relations Kim Thurler. </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-30f1bfb9-c2ab-91bb-05e3-105c7db8806e">Thurler added that students participating in the “1+4” program will maintain close ties with the Boston area university throughout the year-long experience. While away, they’ll be encouraged to participate in volunteering and teaching organizations thousands of miles from home.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-30f1bfb9-c2ab-91bb-05e3-105c7db8806e">Abby Falik, the founder and CEO of <a href="http://globalcitizenyear.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Global Citizen Year</a>, an organization that each year sends a class of fellows to spend a “bridge year” in developing countries, helped design the program with Tufts’ provost after the two met at an Aspen Institute event last summer. She emphasized that it’s part of a burgeoning trend.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-30f1bfb9-c2ab-91bb-05e3-105c7db8806e">“I think Tufts is playing a leadership role in recognizing that real-world experience sets students up to be better students,” Falik told </span><em>Newsweek</em>. “[But] it is absolutely the case that lower income kids have not had the luxury of these kinds of opportunities. Most programs that do exist are quite expensive and quite exclusive.”</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-30f1bfb9-c2ab-91bb-05e3-105c7db8806e">Falik added that her organization consciously avoids the term “gap year.” “We're trying to change the notion that it's a gap between two life stages rather than a launching pad or a necessary first step.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-30f1bfb9-c2ab-91bb-05e3-105c7db8806e">Kristof concurred with the value of the year, whatever the terminology, but disputed that there’s an economic barrier keeping less wealthy students from enjoying the option.</span></p><p><span id="docs-internal-guid-30f1bfb9-c2ab-91bb-05e3-105c7db8806e">“It's true that gap year programs tend to be very expensive, but people can always make their own program,” he said. “I don't know how much of a real barrier it is.”</span></p>http://www.newsweek.com/seeing-value-gap-years-tufts-university-offers-pay-231998Fri, 14 Mar 2014 18:25:25 -0400Will Wesleyan Be the Next School to Do Away With Frats?http://www.newsweek.com/will-wesleyan-be-next-school-do-away-frats-231968
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-36ec0d26-c21d-c406-edb6-c453aeaaba3b">Wesleyan University, a school that has recently </span><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/02/the-dark-power-of-fraternities/357580/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">generated an uncomfortable degree of attention</a> because of a rape lawsuit accusing one of its fraternities of negligence, is involved in another rape lawsuit accusing yet another one of its fraternities of negligence.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-36ec0d26-c21d-c406-edb6-c453aeaaba3b">This time, it’s sparked a heated discussion about how residential fraternities should continue on campus, if they should continue at all.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-36ec0d26-c21d-c406-edb6-c453aeaaba3b">The frat allegedly at fault is Psi Upsilon, and the details of the case are lurid enough to disturb the house’s </span><a href="http://wesleying.org/2012/08/23/wesleying-unofficial-orientation-series-greek-life-at-the-tech/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">campus reputation</a> as the “nice guy” frat.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-36ec0d26-c21d-c406-edb6-c453aeaaba3b">A Wesleyan student is </span><a href="http://www.middletownpress.com/general-news/20140312/students-suit-details-alleged-rape-at-wesleyan-fraternity-party" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">suing</a> the school’s chapter—as well as its international organization—for $10 million, saying that the frat failed to protect her when she was raped at a pledge party in May. The incident took place in the fraternity’s common room, according to the official complaint, where pledges removed their clothes as part of a booze-fueled “strip show.” It was there that the defendant “threw [the student] over the leg of a couch, pulled down her leggings, and raped her in the presence of numerous others,” the complaint says.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-36ec0d26-c21d-c406-edb6-c453aeaaba3b">The alleged attacker was dropped by Psi U the following day and “basically excommunicated,” according to a student. He was expelled from Wesleyan following a disciplinary hearing, but no criminal charges have been filed, and local police say the investigation is ongoing.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-36ec0d26-c21d-c406-edb6-c453aeaaba3b">The university isn’t named as a defendant in the case. But after a </span><a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/hillaryreinsberg/the-strange-history-of-wesleyan-universitys-rape" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">drawn-out legal battle</a> involving a 2010 rape at Beta Theta Pi, details of which recently resurfaced in <em>The Atlantic</em>’s March cover story, it’s not Wesleyan’s first such high-profile lawsuit in recent memory—and students fear it won’t be the last. The incident might have permanent implications for the three residential fraternities that remain on the central Connecticut campus.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-36ec0d26-c21d-c406-edb6-c453aeaaba3b">According to President Michael S. Roth, the topic is already under discussion by the school’s Board of Trustees.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-36ec0d26-c21d-c406-edb6-c453aeaaba3b">In an all-campus email sent Wednesday, Roth expressed horror at the “shameful assault”—and hinted that Wesleyan might </span><a href="http://www.newsweek.com/inside-colleges-killed-frats-good-231346">join fellow liberal arts colleges recently profiled by <em>Newsweek</em></a> in reconsidering the role of frats on campus.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-36ec0d26-c21d-c406-edb6-c453aeaaba3b">“While these fraternities have had some autonomy, all have seen increased scrutiny over the past few years. We intend to focus our attention on improving the safety of these spaces,” the president wrote. “In addition, we will be gathering information to present to the Board as it considers what role, if any, residential fraternities will have on our campus in the future.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-36ec0d26-c21d-c406-edb6-c453aeaaba3b">Reached via email, Roth confirmed that he’s looking into the fraternity question—and that he’s read about the elimination of frats at peer schools—but declined to elaborate until he receives further input. </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-36ec0d26-c21d-c406-edb6-c453aeaaba3b">Wesleyan’s students are less shy on the subject.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-36ec0d26-c21d-c406-edb6-c453aeaaba3b">Gabe Rosenberg, a sophomore, said he’s working on organizing a community discussion on the subject of residential fraternities and sexual assault. “For some of us,” he said, “maybe an ultimate goal is to ban single-sex residential organizations.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-36ec0d26-c21d-c406-edb6-c453aeaaba3b">“Fraternities need to prove why they should exist on campus,” said his co-organizer, sophomore Jack Spira. “It<span id="docs-internal-guid-36ec0d26-c21d-c406-edb6-c453aeaaba3b">’</span>s debated whether or not it<span id="docs-internal-guid-36ec0d26-c21d-c406-edb6-c453aeaaba3b">’</span>s useful to have a good house to party at if there<span id="docs-internal-guid-36ec0d26-c21d-c406-edb6-c453aeaaba3b">’</span>s a rape every year.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-36ec0d26-c21d-c406-edb6-c453aeaaba3b">Anya Morgan, a senior, shares the goal of shuttering the frat houses.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-36ec0d26-c21d-c406-edb6-c453aeaaba3b">“It’s undeniable that sexual assault is happening in these spaces,” Morgan wrote in an email to </span><em>Newsweek</em>. “There’s a concrete action that can be taken to eliminate this portion of assaults on campus. Get rid of the frats.”</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-36ec0d26-c21d-c406-edb6-c453aeaaba3b">In a press release, Psi U Executive Director Thomas Fox said the organization “takes all reports of risk management violations, especially those with regard to sexual assault, very seriously.” </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-36ec0d26-c21d-c406-edb6-c453aeaaba3b">But Zachary Larabee, a junior and former member of </span>Alpha Epsilon Pi, disputed that frats are responsible for rape.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-36ec0d26-c21d-c406-edb6-c453aeaaba3b">“The only reason it happens within their houses is because these houses are much bigger and provide a much larger space for student activity,” he argued. Plus, since the last lawsuit, fraternities have made a conscious push for education on sexual violence and bystander intervention training.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-36ec0d26-c21d-c406-edb6-c453aeaaba3b">“It’s so much more than an email chain to a bunch of guys saying, ‘Yo, </span>keg tonight at the house,’ ” Larabee said. “It<span id="docs-internal-guid-36ec0d26-c21d-c406-edb6-c453aeaaba3b">’</span>s also one of the only reasons that I take part in student groups and charity.”</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-36ec0d26-c21d-c406-edb6-c453aeaaba3b">That argument isn’t compelling, Morgan said.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-36ec0d26-c21d-c406-edb6-c453aeaaba3b">“It seems they use community service to apologize for being the archaic, heterosexist hotbeds of rape culture that they know they’re perceived as,” she wrote. “These stereotypes act as self-fulfilling prophecies.” </span></p><p dir="ltr"><em><span id="docs-internal-guid-36ec0d26-c21d-c406-edb6-c453aeaaba3b">Disclosure: The author is an alumnus of Wesleyan University. He is unaffiliated with the fraternities on campus.</span></em></p>http://www.newsweek.com/will-wesleyan-be-next-school-do-away-frats-231968Fri, 14 Mar 2014 15:42:51 -0400Inside the Colleges That Killed Frats for Goodhttp://www.newsweek.com/inside-colleges-killed-frats-good-231346
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">A crudely battered female mannequin dangled from a Middlebury College frat balcony in early May of 1988. Doused in blood-tinted paint and flashing a sexually charged slur, the gross spectacle appeared during a toga party at Delta Upsilon, the jock fraternity — and there it remained the following day, an ugly blight on the Vermont college’s idyllic campus, until a dean intervened. Students gawked but mostly carried on. It was the school’s small group of feminists who alerted the news crews up north in Burlington.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">When Cole Moore Odell arrived as a freshman in the Fall of 1989, the story still hung fresh in the air. “The mannequin-out-the-window incident was kind of famous on campus when we got there,” he said a quarter of a century later. “It could be argued that [by supporting the school’s fraternities] you are at least tacitly approving that in a way.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">At Middlebury, the mannequin was an emblem of the unchecked influence six fraternities had exerted over campus life for generations — and it marked the beginning of the end. Later that month, Middlebury president Olin Robison declared it “a point beyond which our tolerance cannot and must not be stretched” and placed Delta Upsilon under suspension for a full year. By January of 1990, the Board of Trustees insisted that the frats integrate women, presumably forfeiting their national affiliations in the process, or dissolve. A year later, the school’s fraternities had been officially abolished, several of them swept up into a new decade’s system of coed “social houses.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">Perhaps, as Caitlin Flanagan argues in<em> </em></span><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/03/the-dark-power-of-fraternities/357580/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><em>The Atlantic</em>’s March cover story</a>, “fraternities are now mightier than the colleges and universities that host them.” Perhaps, armed with their sordid hazing rituals and sexist customs, they have hardened into unassailable American institutions, clutching in a stranglehold grip those schools and administrators who dare question their formidable rule. Perhaps nothing can be done.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">Perhaps. But not so at Middlebury, or the handful of elite Northeastern colleges that took similar steps, both before and after, to tweak the gender gap in the Greek sphere. At Middlebury, the system came shakily — if not neatly — undone. And twenty-something years later, the college isn’t looking back with regret.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">“We’re pleased that Middlebury decided some time ago to make our residential life system inclusive of all students,” said Shirley Collado, Dean of the College. “I think that Middlebury is stronger and more diverse.” </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">* * * </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">As colossal institutional overhauls go, this one didn’t occur overnight.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">The transition, Collado said, was set in motion a decade or so prior, when in early 1979 the Board of Trustees voted to conclude the long-running tradition of fraternity dining. At the time, Hal Findlay, class of 1980, </span><a href="http://middarchive.middlebury.edu/cdm/ref/collection/underpub/id/3226" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">told <em>The Middlebury Campus</em></a> he wasn’t sure if frats could “survive” sans in-house dining; the controversy would carry well into 1981.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">Drama struck further when, in 1986, Vermont raised the drinking age to 21, rendering illegal the booze-fueled hijinks frats had long taken for granted. Then, the mannequin episode, and then, in late 1989, a task force study </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/03/style/campus-life-middlebury-broad-revision-in-social-structure-is-recommended.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">concluded</a> “the narrowly defined, fraternity-dominated social life on campus is incompatible with our vision of the future.”</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">The Board of Trustees made the call, unanimously, the following month. Single-sex social organizations would be no more at Middlebury. A newly formed residential system was set in place in 1991, sorting Middlebury first-years into one of five coed “living-learning” communities.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">Meanwhile, some frats managed to morph into social houses; others dissolved. The reaction wasn’t entirely cordial on the part of the houses.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">“There was one group of brothers at Delta Kappa Epsilon who totally trashed the house,” recalled a librarian who asked not to be named. “They took the bannister off the staircase railing, they broke holes in the walls, they broke windows — because they were just so angry. It cost the college a whole lot to put that building back into shape to be used again.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">Banned from their own house, DKE brothers waged a fruitless legal battle, claiming their right to association, and they eventually burrowed underground, risking suspension to meet at a secret off-campus warehouse. </span>The <em>New York Times</em> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/29/us/fraternities-go-underground-to-defy-college-ban.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">caught on to the trend</a> in 1994. Odell made it to one such party, which he described as “an uncomfortable gathering in a giant empty box motivated more by a spirit of resistance than enjoyment.” The four-year student turnover squashed any lingering anger over the ban, however, and if underground frats exist on campus today, students say they exert little if any influence on the social sphere.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">But let’s rewind. Of the 11 elite campuses that make up the </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NESCAC" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">New England Small College Athletic Conference</a>, Middlebury was not the first — and wouldn’t be the last — to wage a public war on the testosterone-fueled institutions that had ruled campus decades before their administrators had first worn diapers. The prestigious Williams College, perched on 450 acres in scenic northwestern Massachusetts, led the charge a generation prior.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561"><a href="http://archives.williams.edu/presidents/chandler.php" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">John Chandler</a></span> joined the faculty in 1955, became dean of the faculty and then president of the school in 1973, and has completed a book manuscript on the subject of frats. He had a front-row view. And at 90, he might be the only former faculty member alive to tell the full story.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">The frat crisis, he told </span><em>Newsweek</em>, actually dates back to World War II. Before the war, fraternities ruled the campus, their houses populated by the affluent, well-bred graduates of Exeter, Andover, Deerfield, and so forth. Then came the war veterans, who hailed from more modest backgrounds.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">“The war veterans looked upon this as ‘Mickey Mouse,’ as a waste of time, and furthermore they didn't like the whole caste system,” Chandler said. “There was a tremendous amount of status consciousness about fraternities.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">Discrimination played a role there, too. Not against women — Williams was all-male at the time. But, Chandler said, “there remained the system of blackballing and secret agreements between some fraternities and their national bodies to exclude blacks and Jews.” When one frat, Sigma Phi, opted to admit black students, its pledge class fell by almost half. “It was essentially a caste system based on socioeconomic status as perceived by students,” Chandler said.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">In the fall of 1961, a committee was formed to examine concerns about the influence of frats on social life. Fraternities, </span><a href="http://www.kanecap.com/doc/williams/report_of_the_committee_on.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">it concluded</a>, had compromised “the primary educational purposes of the College.” A year later, the Board of Trustees set in motion the transition away from the system.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">“The anger among alumni and students was ferocious for about two years, two-and-a-half years,” Chandler recalled. But soon after, “the decision was made to admit women, the ability to raise money went way up, alienated alumni who had been the victim of the fraternity system came back to the college, and the standing of Williams academically rose.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">Underground fraternities would pop up across the border in Vermont during Chandler’s presidency, but students were weary. “I had a lot of anxious students coming to see me, saying, ‘Are fraternities returning to Williams? I came because there were no fraternities.’”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">The former president recognized that Williams had been ahead of the curve. He pointed to Hamilton College, where he previously served as president, as a school that botched its Greek reforms, opting to maintain frats and sororities but ban their members from dining or living together. (Hamilton declined to comment on these policies when reached via email.) Colby College, he said, which sits six hours north in the tundras of Maine, followed Williams’ lead nicely. The school was wrapping up its transition period just as Middlebury’s was heating up.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">According to Cal Mackenzie, who has been a Professor of Government at Colby since 1978, the war on frats began in 1979 with the arrival of President William R. Cotter, who had attended Harvard and thus had no experience with fraternities.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">“The leadup to it went on for years,” Mackenzie recalled. “How much longer can we put up with this terrible, uncivilized behavior? The trouble with undergraduate life is just when you think you’ve cured the problem, those guys go and a new bunch of guys come.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">There was no single nail in the coffin. But the central issue was alcohol.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">“The collective behavior fueled by alcohol frequently got out of hand,” he said. “There was a lot of antisocial activity, a lot of it targeting women. Name-calling when women would walk by, that sort of thing that young men do when they’ve had too much to drink. There were women on campus who wouldn’t walk by fraternity houses.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">In 1983, Cotter appointed a Trustee Commission, which included alumni, students, and faculty. The commission held hearings on campus, spoke to alumni around the country, reviewed the conditions of fraternities, and, in early 1984, voted unanimously to eliminate the system. The frats were incensed by the news. “They had a bonfire that night and burned up some of their own furniture on fraternity row,” Mackenzie said.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">Douglas Terp, a member of the Class of 1984 and current Vice President for Administration, served on that commission. He was also in a fraternity. Unsurprisingly, he lost some friends.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">“The term [traitor] has been applied a few times,” he said. But he stood by the vote. “If you have roughly a third of the campus in all-male housing that can self-select, you’ve already set up a little bit of a conflict on gender. Not having that seems to be an improvement from the start.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">Terp looked back on his own fraternity days with equal doses of affection and scorn. “Our sort of anthem was </span><em>Animal House</em>,” he recalled. “That was the greatest movie of all time as far as we were concerned.”</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">There wasn’t a coed replacement to be pumped into being, either. As at Middlebury and Williams, some frats ventured underground. But on campus, at least, Greek life came to a close, despite the efforts of the five frats who filed suit in an </span><a href="http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2457&amp;dat=19840522&amp;id=wwY1AAAAIBAJ&amp;sjid=R08KAAAAIBAJ&amp;pg=4613,3456490" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">eleventh-hour bid to block the new policy</a>. According to Earl Smith, a professor who served as secretary of the commission, the number of women in campus leadership positions swiftly rose.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">Fifteen years later and fifty miles south, Bowdoin College would join the club.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">* * * </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">So, were the chronicles of abuse and social violence that led these schools to axe frats so much worse than what goes on in frat houses today, the sordid tales detailed in </span><em>The Atlantic</em> and <em><a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/confessions-of-an-ivy-league-frat-boy-inside-dartmouths-hazing-abuses-20120328" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Rolling Stone</a></em>? Let’s return to the Green Mountain State.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">It’s difficult, as might be expected, to pinpoint the precise ills that led Middlebury College to take the radical path it took. Media coverage </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/29/us/fraternities-go-underground-to-defy-college-ban.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">from those years</a> mentions most of the usual suspects: worrisome hazing rituals, out-of-control alcohol abuse, sexism. Odell stressed that the school was equally interested in creating new spaces — hence the slightly Hogwartsian <a href="http://www.middlebury.edu/studentlife/commons" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">commons system</a>, which sprung up in 1991, grouping students into one of five “living-learning communities.”</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">“I think that Middlebury had a dual interest in effectively banishing the fraternities,” he said. “They created a potentially safer, certainly more egalitarian campus [with the commons].”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">What isn’t much in question, however, is that gender relations on campus were especially fraught at the tail end of the fraternity era — and that the mannequin episode served as a tipping point. </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">That incident prompted the formation of a Special Committee on Attitudes Toward Gender, which spent the next three semesters surveying the campus and determining recommendations for President Olin Clyde Robison. The </span><a href="http://sites.middlebury.edu/gendercouncil/files/2011/03/1990_CATG.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">committee’s report</a>, rife with tales of sexual harassment and a pervasive “anti-feminism feeling among the male members of Middlebury,” reads like a portrait of a New England college limping its way through the Eisenhower era— not a dispatch from the dawn of the nineties.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">“I can't tell you how many times I have walked past fraternity houses and heard comments about what I am wearing, my body or my sexual ability in bed,” a senior woman wrote. Another student reported, “A female friend recently told me that she had been flashed the night before at a party. Apparently a group of males surrounded her and one of them flashed her.” That woman never bothered reporting the act.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">Comments from the male students are no less telling. “A lot of times I sit with my friends and we comment on girls as they walk by — make jokes, that sort of thing,” one guy admitted. Another student argued that “people who are extreme radicals that blow everything out of proportion just to prove their point ask to be harassed.” </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">And harassed they were. The survey found that eight percent of male students and 22 percent of females reported having been sexually harassed at the school. Probably more, as “it was evident that a substantially higher number of students had experienced harassment yet did not label the experience as sexual harassment.” Meanwhile, another 17 percent of female respondents said they’d been forced to engage in sexual activity against their will on a date, and eight percent said they’d considered leaving Middlebury because of sexism.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">The report’s authors recognized fraternities as a hub for these sorts of tensions. But if they regarded the total overhaul of the system as a likely or even plausible solution, they didn’t say.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">Decades later, a librarian conceded that sexual misconduct remains a major issue on Middlebury’s campus, as it is on virtually any campus. Last spring, 23 students submitted poems and stories describing their experiences with sexual violence for an </span><a href="http://middbeat.org/2013/04/22/hundreds-turn-out-for-it-happens-here/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">awareness event</a> titled “It Happens Here.” But, she said, “there’s a greater awareness of it than there was,” and rape culture is no longer facilitated by a guys-first Greek presence.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">“I’d say that the misogyny sometimes associated with fraternities has disappeared,” she reflected. “The social houses don't have things like [the mannequin incident]; none of that has happened. It's a different culture among young women and men than it was 20 years ago. They grow up doing things together in groups.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">An alumna who graduated in the late 1990s, who asked not to be identified by name discussing sexual assault, said “there were guys that were entitled enough to think that they were entitled to whatever they wanted and there were definitely some guys that I stayed away from.” But the social houses were not the locus of such misconduct, she said. “They really did take the whole comradery, brother/sister thing pretty seriously, so it seemed like they, for the most part, looked out for and took care of each other.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">And while a four-year turnover by its nature precludes much sense of institutional memory, students today seem pretty sure the college is better off for the change.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">“I think Middlebury student culture is a lot more balanced and inclusive than it would be with the presence of Greek life,” wrote Luke Whelan, who graduated this past December, in an email. “The people who would be in frats and sororities are still there for sure, but they don't dominate the social scene.” Whelan was a member of The Mill, a social house largely associated with hipsters and which Whelan says fosters community “without the exclusivity and entitlement associated with frats.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">Those social houses, one of which is substance-free, “are more diverse than they have ever been in the broadest sense,” said Shirley Collado, a professor of Psychology and Dean of the College. “I don't think that they are comparable [with frats] at all.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">Others who’ve passed through the coed system, like Daniel Roberts, a </span><em>Fortune Magazine</em> writer who graduated in 2009, have viewed them differently.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">“They're just like frats, except that they happen to be coed,” said Roberts, who recalled tour guides boasting about the lack of frats as a selling point. But that makes for a huge difference, he acknowledged. “The social houses, much more than I understand frats and other houses to be, are very welcoming and inclusive.” </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">And when they begin acting like the frats of old, the administration steps in as aggressively as it did then.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">A series of substance violations and two alleged sexual assault cases, for instance, </span><a href="http://middleburycampus.com/article/ihc-keeps-close-watch-on-prescott/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">landed social house Alpha Delta Phi on probation</a> for the entire 2006-2007 academic year. ADP morphed into Delta House, which was <a href="http://middleburycampus.com/article/liebowitz-officially-puts-delta-house-to-rest/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">finally disbanded</a> after further violations last May. Whelan said the school’s sensitivity about its Greek-stained past and “micromanaging” of the social scene, including a vaguely Kafkaesque party-registering system, was a point of frustration among students — but not one worth trading for frats.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">Colby, similarly, hasn’t looked back on its fraternity years with particular fondness.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">“There are redeeming qualities of fraternities, I'm sure, but there's nothing that can't be replicated in different ways,” said Earl Smith. “It certainly was a better place for women, and a better place all around, I think.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">Cal Mackenzie recalled the year directly after the school banned fraternities, when he became Vice President for Development and, in the course of those duties, moseyed around courting alumni for cash. Many were upset — but came around to the decision with little resistance.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">“Life is much better,” he said. “Women can go wherever they want to go. The social life at Colby is much healthier than it used to be.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">But, with a pang of sadness, he regretted that the romantic fraternity culture of the 1950s and ‘60s had been a casualty of the eighties’ </span><em>Animal House</em> ethos — and the subsequent abolition era.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">“When I was a fraternity member in the ‘60s, we wore coats and ties to dinner every night. There were interfraternity debates, there was an interfraternity sing…” He broke off. “But it was a much more civilized lifestyle in the ‘60s. That changed for a lot of reasons.”</span></p><p><span id="docs-internal-guid-9171c540-acc8-e21d-bf2a-31586f4fa561">It’s changing, still.</span></p>http://www.newsweek.com/inside-colleges-killed-frats-good-231346Mon, 10 Mar 2014 12:24:22 -0400The Viral Photo Campaign That Reveals What It’s Like to Be Black at Harvardhttp://www.newsweek.com/viral-photo-campaign-reveals-what-its-be-black-harvard-231275
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-be1f3c3d-9daa-175e-9f8c-5669d409452a">“You don’t sound black… You sound smart.” “You’re the </span>whitest black person I know.” “You’re dressed like you might shoot me right now.”</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-be1f3c3d-9daa-175e-9f8c-5669d409452a">Those are several of the brazenly racist comments black undergraduates report hearing at Harvard. They are also the captions on display in a powerful photo campaign that highlights those frustrations prominently around campus, where they can’t easily be ignored.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-be1f3c3d-9daa-175e-9f8c-5669d409452a">The project is called “I, Too, Am Harvard,” or #itooamharvard, as it’s been hashtagged in social media and on the photo displays. The student who masterminded it, Kimiko Matsuda-Lawrence, says it’s in advance of a theatrical performance of the same name that she is directing this weekend.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-be1f3c3d-9daa-175e-9f8c-5669d409452a">According to Matsuda-Lawrence, a sophomore, the idea arose out of conversations about racial dynamics on campus, particularly in the wake of a widely criticized </span><a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/column/the-snollygoster/article/2012/11/2/Siskind-affirmative-action/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><em>Harvard Crimson</em> op-ed</a> on affirmative action.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-be1f3c3d-9daa-175e-9f8c-5669d409452a">“People were talking about their experiences with being a black student on Harvard’s campus and being made to feel like you don’t belong, feeling like you’re at Harvard but not </span><em>of </em>Harvard, feelings of always being the other, being the only black person in your dorm or a class, or being looked to for the black perspective,” Matsuda-Lawrence told <em>Newsweek</em>.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-be1f3c3d-9daa-175e-9f8c-5669d409452a">After those discussions, Matsuda-Lawrence embarked on an independent study that entailed interviewing 40 students of color about their experiences. Now she has seven other students working with her.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-be1f3c3d-9daa-175e-9f8c-5669d409452a">“There was this great diversity of experiences of blackness, but also this great commonality of this feeling of not always being valued on this campus,” she said. “Feeling like you don't fully belong or have ownership in the way that white students can."</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-be1f3c3d-9daa-175e-9f8c-5669d409452a">Glenda Carpio, the faculty member who supervised the study, </span><a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/style/2014/03/06/the-too-harvard-photo-campaign-and-stage-event-highlights-black-students-frustrations-with-racial-stereotypes-campus/dY57mxCTTzOrHBoCbfd0sJ/story.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">told The Boston Globe</a> that Matsuda-Lawrence’s work “challenges assumptions that questions about identity are anti-intellectual.”</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-be1f3c3d-9daa-175e-9f8c-5669d409452a">But the public campaign has extended well outside the borders of Cambridge, racking up thousands of Facebook shares and inspiring messages of support from other schools, both inside and outside of the Ivy League. It also invites comparisons with </span><a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23BBUM&amp;src=typd">#BBUM</a>, or “Being Black at the University of Michigan,” a similarly digitally minded social justice campaign that was set in motion after a “Hood Ratchet”-themed party took place at the Ann Arbor campus.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-be1f3c3d-9daa-175e-9f8c-5669d409452a">“It’s just a movement of black students rising up all over the country, saying, ‘We are here and these places are ours and we worked just as hard to be here and no one is going to question us,’” Matsuda-Lawrence said.</span></p><p><span id="docs-internal-guid-be1f3c3d-9daa-175e-9f8c-5669d409452a">Below are a sample of the photos, which initially </span><a href="http://itooamharvard.tumblr.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">appeared on the project’s Tumblr</a>.</p><p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/03/07/harvard2.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="609" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2014/03/07/harvard2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/03/07/harvard2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2014/03/07/harvard2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2014/03/07/harvard2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2014/03/07/harvard2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="609" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/03/07/harvard2.jpg" alt="harvard2" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
itooamharvard.tumblr.com/ </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/03/07/harvard5.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="640" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2014/03/07/harvard5.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/03/07/harvard5.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2014/03/07/harvard5.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2014/03/07/harvard5.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2014/03/07/harvard5.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="640" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/03/07/harvard5.jpg" alt="harvard5" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
itooamharvard.tumblr.com/ </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/03/07/harvard4.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="640" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2014/03/07/harvard4.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/03/07/harvard4.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2014/03/07/harvard4.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2014/03/07/harvard4.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2014/03/07/harvard4.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="640" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/03/07/harvard4.jpg" alt="harvard4" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
itooamharvard.tumblr.com/ </span>
</span>
</span>
</p>http://www.newsweek.com/viral-photo-campaign-reveals-what-its-be-black-harvard-231275Fri, 07 Mar 2014 12:55:32 -0500SAT Gets Radical Revamp and a Return to a 1600 Top Scorehttp://www.newsweek.com/sat-gets-radical-revamp-and-return-1600-top-score-231033
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-030fc459-93e1-5406-c2eb-04b8e3081104">The creators of the SAT exam announced major changes to the college-entrance exam Wednesday. The redesign, the first since 2005, will make the essay portion optional, remove the most obscure vocabulary words, and end the penalty for randomly guessing wrong answers, the </span><em><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/06/education/major-changes-in-sat-announced-by-college-board.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">New York Times</a></em> reported.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-030fc459-93e1-5406-c2eb-04b8e3081104">The math section will be more narrowly focused on use of ratios, percentages and proportions, and another section will focus on functions related to calculus. The optional essay portion will have a separate score, dropping the top score back to 1600, where it was until 2005 when it was raised to 2400.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-030fc459-93e1-5406-c2eb-04b8e3081104">David Coleman, president of the College Board, criticized his own test, the SAT, and its main rival, the ACT, both “have become disconnected from the work of our high schools,” David Coleman, president of the College Board, told the </span><em>Times</em>.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-030fc459-93e1-5406-c2eb-04b8e3081104">Only 43% of the high school class of 2013 scored high enough to succeed in college, College Board, the non-profit that produces the exam, told </span><em><a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/03/05/sat-college-board-redesign-college-entrance-exam/6078091/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">USA Today</a></em>.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-030fc459-93e1-5406-c2eb-04b8e3081104">The new version will be administered beginning in 2016.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-030fc459-93e1-5406-c2eb-04b8e3081104">Analysis of the SAT has long found </span><a href="http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-scores-and-family-income/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">a correlation</a> between higher income and <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/10/09/the-bottom-line-on-sat-scores-in-one-chart/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">higher scores</a>, and the test has been <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/test/history.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">criticized</a> as an unfair assessment for college admissions, since students from wealthier families can afford expensive SAT tutoring sessions, while lower-income students cannot. The College Board’s revamp of the exam will include programs to help low-income students, like fee waivers for up to four college applications, as well as free online practice problems and instructional videos.</p><p><span id="docs-internal-guid-030fc459-93e1-5406-c2eb-04b8e3081104">Yet at the end of the day, </span><a href="http://www.npr.org/2014/02/18/277059528/college-applicants-sweat-the-sats-perhaps-they-shouldn-t" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">high grades in high school</a> remain a better indication of success in college than SAT scores, and more and more schools are taking note. Over 800 colleges and universities <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/28/sat-act-not-required-colleges_n_2206391.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">don’t even require</a> SAT or ACT scores to apply for admission. Wake Forest University, for example, <a href="http://rethinkingadmissions.wfu.edu/q_and_a.php" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">found</a> that ending the SAT requirement made its student body more diverse. </p>http://www.newsweek.com/sat-gets-radical-revamp-and-return-1600-top-score-231033Wed, 05 Mar 2014 15:15:33 -0500In Another Blow to Free Labor, Columbia University Halts Academic Credit for Internshiphttp://www.newsweek.com/another-blow-free-labor-columbia-university-halts-academic-credit-internship-230554
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5583771d-79a2-6d39-99e1-ea222b4fc923">In an attempt to pressure employers to pay interns in accordance with </span><a href="http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Labor Department guidelines</a>, Columbia University will no longer offer its undergraduates registration credits in exchange for internship experience. The policy takes effect immediately, though the school says it will consider exceptions for students who have already signed on for internships that expect them to be receiving “R” credits, which don’t count towards graduation.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5583771d-79a2-6d39-99e1-ea222b4fc923">“There is no doubt that internships can be valuable experiences for students seeking an introduction to a range of careers and professional cultures,” Dean of Academic Kathryn Yatrakis wrote in a campus email obtained by </span>Newsweek. “However, we expect companies to appropriately compensate students for work performed during internships.”</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5583771d-79a2-6d39-99e1-ea222b4fc923">The new policy, the email said, is consistent with “many of our peer institutions,” as well as the Fair Labor Standards Act.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5583771d-79a2-6d39-99e1-ea222b4fc923">Indeed, Columbia isn’t the only high-profile Manhattan university ramping up its internship regulations this month. NYU </span><a href="http://www.newsweek.com/internships-where-you-work-free-are-illegal-colleges-havent-treated-them-way-229349">tightened its screening process</a> for internships — paid or otherwise — listed on its online jobs board, a move that drew praise from labor activists who view colleges as crucial gatekeepers in the unpaid internship rat race. Columbia’s shift, in similar fashion, will discourage for-profit companies from using academic credit as justification to forego compensation — a <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/175019/want-make-internships-more-just-stop-requiring-school-credit" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">common enough practice</a> that, in some instances, forces students to pay additional tuition to work for free.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5583771d-79a2-6d39-99e1-ea222b4fc923">“Columbia’s policy change is a giant step forward in changing the unethical practice of allowing college credit to replace paychecks for an intern’s work,” Christina Isnardi, an NYU student who pushed for those changes, said.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5583771d-79a2-6d39-99e1-ea222b4fc923">Peter Sterne, a Columbia senior who founded a </span><a href="http://whopaysinterns.tumblr.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Tumblr to track which media companies pay their interns</a>, also applauded the decision — both in an <a href="http://columbialion.com/blog/ending-the-farce-of-unpaid-internships/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">op-ed for student blog The Lion</a> and in an interview with Newsweek.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5583771d-79a2-6d39-99e1-ea222b4fc923">“Whether or not you agree that unpaid internships are illegal or not, I think we can all agree that this idea of providing ‘R’ credits for unpaid internships really didn’t make any sense,” Sterne said. “It was really only there to assuage the fears of employers. It was a loophole, a workaround, a fig leaf.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5583771d-79a2-6d39-99e1-ea222b4fc923">At one internship, he satisfied an employer’s terms by providing an advisor’s letter confirming he was eligible for the credit, then never followed up to redeem it — not that it would have counted towards graduation anyway. (An “academic internship,” by comparison, does count, but requires that students set up an independent study, converting the internship into a research project guided by a faculty member.)</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5583771d-79a2-6d39-99e1-ea222b4fc923">Fittingly, the new policy casts doubt on two baffling employer fantasies: that academic credit poses a legal basis for uncompensated labor — and that it might magically transform a summer spent manning coffee machines into an educational experience.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5583771d-79a2-6d39-99e1-ea222b4fc923">It also stokes fears that enterprising Columbia students, many of them affluent enough to work wilfully without pay, will find themselves at a disadvantage.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5583771d-79a2-6d39-99e1-ea222b4fc923">“Many students on campus are complaining that this is hurting them in the short run as they are now eligible for fewer positions,” wrote senior Alexandra Svokos in an email. “I understand that stance, but I also hope it incentivizes students to seek out paid internships or to ask for payment from listed unpaid positions. As long as we keep accepting unpaid positions, they are going to continue existing.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5583771d-79a2-6d39-99e1-ea222b4fc923">Plus, as Columbia hints in its announcement, the policy is not dissimilar from those in place at other Ivy League campuses. Yale and Harvard confirmed that they don’t grant academic credit for internships. So did a Dartmouth spokesperson, who told </span>Newsweek that “it really hasn’t affected the number of students getting internships.”</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5583771d-79a2-6d39-99e1-ea222b4fc923">Meanwhile, some miles south of Columbia’s uptown campus, a handful of media companies, including </span><a href="http://whopaysinterns.tumblr.com/post/69077040097/slate-yes-finally" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Slate</a> and <a href="http://whopaysinterns.tumblr.com/post/68785789118/vice-yes" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Vice</a>, quietly began compensating their interns in 2013. As recently as last year, Vice’s <a href="http://scs-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/jobs/us/VICE-INTERN-OVERVIEW-4-13-4.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">requirements</a> included a “letter from your school indicating you are receiving academic credit for the internship.”</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5583771d-79a2-6d39-99e1-ea222b4fc923">Columbia didn’t provide additional comment in time for publication. But Sterne said no one seems to be panicking about the potential downside.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5583771d-79a2-6d39-99e1-ea222b4fc923">“The people who care about this issue are like, ‘Oh, this is good. Columbia is no longer complicit in screwing over students through unpaid internships,’” he said.</span></p>http://www.newsweek.com/another-blow-free-labor-columbia-university-halts-academic-credit-internship-230554Fri, 28 Feb 2014 12:54:07 -0500Federal Complaint Over Berkeley's Handling of Sex Assault Cases Expandshttp://www.newsweek.com/federal-complaint-over-berkeleys-handling-sex-assault-cases-expands-230452
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7e986485-7545-088f-2ad6-ab1c6ba58d50">More than 30 current and former students filed federal complaints against the University of California at Berkeley on Wednesday, alleging that the university violated federal law by inadequately investigating or altogether ignoring their sexual assaults. </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7e986485-7545-088f-2ad6-ab1c6ba58d50">Berkeley’s handling of sexual assault has been under scrutiny in recent months: in August, the state </span><a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2013/aug/21/local/la-me-assault-audit-20130822" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">approved an audit</a> of the university’s policies, and several U.S. campuses, including Berkeley, Occidental College and the University of Southern California, are currently the subject of federal lawsuits brought by student survivors of assault. They allege the schools violated the Clery Act, which requires colleges and universities to disclose information about crimes that happen on or near campuses, as well as Title IX, another federal gender equity law meant to prohibit sexual harassment in schools.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7e986485-7545-088f-2ad6-ab1c6ba58d50">“At Berkeley, a lot of people are survivors [of sexual assault],” Sofie Karasek, a junior at Berkeley and the lead complainant in the filing, told </span><em>Newsweek</em>. “What I have come to realize is that if you aren’t a survivor by the time you graduate, at least some of your friends will be. A lot of mine are.”</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7e986485-7545-088f-2ad6-ab1c6ba58d50">In January, President Barack Obama formed a federal </span><a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/1/22/obama-targets-campussexualassault.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">task force</a> to combat sexual assault on college campuses, after a <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/sexual_assault_report_1-21-14.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">new report</a> from the White House Council on Women and Girls found that nearly 1 in 5 college women are sexually assaulted by the time they graduate.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7e986485-7545-088f-2ad6-ab1c6ba58d50">In May, nine Berkeley students filed a federal complaint against the school. The new complaint, which includes the original nine women, has grown to include 31 students who say that the U.S. Department of Education has failed to do anything on their behalf over the past nine months. “The federal government has not come to investigate, and has not responded to my emails since September,” Karasek says. </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7e986485-7545-088f-2ad6-ab1c6ba58d50">The U.S. Department of Education declined to comment on the status of the original Berkeley complaint.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7e986485-7545-088f-2ad6-ab1c6ba58d50">Karasek told </span><em>Newsweek </em>she was assaulted in her bed while on an off-campus trip with a university group in February 2012. Her assailant, she says, was a leader in that group, and she was a freshman. A month after assaulting her, Karasek was told by another woman in the group that she too had been assaulted by the same man. Another group leader, who is also a survivor of sexual assault, went to the university’s Gender Equity Resource Center on Karasek’s behalf, but no action was taken.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7e986485-7545-088f-2ad6-ab1c6ba58d50">In April 2012, two months after her assault, Karasek and three other Berkeley students who said they had all been sexually assaulted by the same assailant reported the assaults to the university</span>. They were told they needed to submit written statements. After three of them did so, Karasek says, she heard nothing more from the university.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7e986485-7545-088f-2ad6-ab1c6ba58d50">“I was completely left in the dark for months until I found out from a friend that [the alleged assailant] was going to graduate early,” Karasek says. Two days before he graduated, in December 2012, Karasek says she received two emails from the university telling her that her case was resolved. In September 2013, Karasek emailed Berkeley’s Center for Student Conduct for more information. An administrator replied that her alleged assailant was found responsible for sexual misconduct and was punished with probation and counseling prior to graduation.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7e986485-7545-088f-2ad6-ab1c6ba58d50">Berkeley declined to comment on specific cases, citing federal privacy law. “I would say our hearts go out to [sexual assault victims]. We understand that these are really traumatic experiences, and we are trying to work with the students to make better policies," </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7e986485-7545-088f-2ad6-ab1c6ba58d50">Claire Holmes, the university’s associate vice chancellor for public affairs, told </span><em>Newsweek</em>. “Obviously there is never enough we can do.”</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7e986485-7545-088f-2ad6-ab1c6ba58d50">After another Berkeley student told campus police she had been sexually assaulted in her dorm room </span><a href="http://www.dailycal.org/2014/02/25/uc-berkeley-student-sexually-assaulted-unit-1-residence-hall/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">this weekend</a> by a male Berkeley student, Chancellor Nicholas Dirks sent <a href="http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2014/02/25/chancellor-dirks-issues-an-update-on-sexual-assault-prevention-response/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">a campus-wide email</a> that said the school intended to hire a new harassment investigator, a survivor advocate and a survivor resource officer. The email was sent before the latest federal complaint was filed.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7e986485-7545-088f-2ad6-ab1c6ba58d50">"I believe we share a common goal for a campus where sexual assault is not present, tolerated or ignored," Dirks said.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7e986485-7545-088f-2ad6-ab1c6ba58d50">The complaint includes narratives of the alleged assaults of several of the complainants, some of whom are not identified. Among the named complainants is Diva Kass, who graduated from Berkeley in 2009. Kass says she was raped twice over the course of 24 hours by another student in a fraternity house in April 2009.</span> Kass says she did not immediately report the rapes to the police because she feared retaliation by her alleged assailant, who she says raped her a third time on a bus later the same month, and from his fraternity brothers, who she says harassed her. Shortly after the third alleged rape, a sorority sister told Kass she had also been raped by the same assailant the previous semester, which prompted Kass to make a report to university officials.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7e986485-7545-088f-2ad6-ab1c6ba58d50">A student conduct hearing was held four months after Kass reported the rapes, but she said she was not allowed to bring an attorney or produce a witness, and the university panel would not accept a statement written by the other alleged victim, according to the complaint. Kass’s alleged assailant was found not guilty by a university panel. </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7e986485-7545-088f-2ad6-ab1c6ba58d50">Sexual assault has “reached, frankly, a fever pitch in our universities” across the U.S., California State Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson told </span><em>Newsweek</em>. “There’s been this trivializing culture around rape that ignores the victim and protects the perpetrator.”</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7e986485-7545-088f-2ad6-ab1c6ba58d50">Jackson, along with State Senator Kevin De León, </span><a href="http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201320140SB967" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">introduced legislation</a> intended to create minimum standards for sexual assault policies across all California universities and colleges, public and private. Another pending California bill would require colleges to immediately report violent crimes to the appropriate police or sheriff’s department unless it is explicitly against the victim’s wishes to do so.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7e986485-7545-088f-2ad6-ab1c6ba58d50">For now, Karasek hopes the new complaint will prompt quick action on the part of the U.S. Department of Education. The department tells </span><em>Newsweek </em>it is “evaluating the complaint allegations to determine whether they are appropriate for a civil rights investigation.”</p>http://www.newsweek.com/federal-complaint-over-berkeleys-handling-sex-assault-cases-expands-230452Thu, 27 Feb 2014 16:40:53 -0500College Football's Signing Day for Recruits Takes Some Strange Turnshttp://www.newsweek.com/college-footballs-signing-day-recruits-takes-some-strange-turns-228264
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-3a217cd4-084f-20c6-e879-0bb0f0cc0f41">National Signing Day occurs on the first Wednesday of every February and, despite its hibernal date, is the pivotal day of the year for college football programs. Nothing determines a school’s future success or misery on the gridiron quite as much as the haul of high school seniors who commit to play there. As for the thousands of players who sign that form and fax—yes, they still have fax machines—it to a school’s athletic department, most of them are about to discover that the marriage is nothing like the courtship. </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-3a217cd4-084f-20c6-e879-0bb0f0cc0f41">A few highlights and bizarre notes from Wednesday….</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-3a217cd4-084f-20c6-e879-0bb0f0cc0f41">1) Alabama, which has won three of the past five national championships, was the consensus winner Wednesday—again. According to <a href="http://www.rivals.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Rivals.com</a>, <a href="http://www.scout.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Scout.com</a>, <a href="http://espn.go.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">ESPN.com</a> and <a href="http://247sports.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">247Sports.com</a>, the Crimson Tide landed the nation’s top-ranked class with five-star gems such as defensive end Da’Shawn Hand of Woodbridge, Va., whom most experts consider the nation’s top overall prospect. </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-3a217cd4-084f-20c6-e879-0bb0f0cc0f41">The Tide, according to Rivals.com, has won the national recruiting war among the 120 or so Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) schools six times in the past seven years. Head coach Nick Saban would have made one heck of a car salesman.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-3a217cd4-084f-20c6-e879-0bb0f0cc0f41">2) Speaking of Rivals.com, which is widely considered the top recruiting site, it crashed for more than an hour on Wednesday due to what its president, Eric Winter, described as “insane traffic.” For Rivals.com to be down on Signing Day is a little like Santa’s sled missing a runner on Christmas Eve. The bio of Winter’s Twitter feed currently reads, </span>“On National Signing Day Rivals experienced an Outage which affected our audience. We are deeply sorry. I am replying to emails as fast as I can (in bulk).”</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-3a217cd4-084f-20c6-e879-0bb0f0cc0f41">3) The nation’s top-rated outside linebacker, Rashaan Evans, is a native of Auburn, Alabama, and attends Auburn High School. Evans seemed destined to attend Auburn University—perhaps he recalls how the Tigers defeated the top-ranked Crimson Tide last November?—and the school had already posted a bio page for Evans on its website in which it labeled his position as “star.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-3a217cd4-084f-20c6-e879-0bb0f0cc0f41">But, in the words of </span>ESPN College Gameday’s avuncular analyst, Lee Corso, “Not so fast, my friend.” Evans surprised everyone by selecting Alabama. He’s about to find out that Thomas Wolfe was correct about one’s ability to go home again.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-3a217cd4-084f-20c6-e879-0bb0f0cc0f41">4) Speaking of going home, Lance Wright will probably not be doing that often once he arrives on campus at Rice University, in Houston. Wright, a wide receiver, attends North Pole High School in North Pole, Alaska, which while technically not located at the North Pole, is situated latitudinally just two degrees south of the Arctic Circle. Wright’s journey from home to Rice will constitute some 4,250 miles, or about the distance between New York City and Rome.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-3a217cd4-084f-20c6-e879-0bb0f0cc0f41">5) Someone forgot to inform Dacorius Law, a running back from Haines City, Fla., exactly how National Signing Day works. On Wednesday Law signed with Mississippi. Then Law signed with Utah. Then Law signed with not one but two junior colleges. Milo Minderbinder, creator of the loyalty oath crusade in <em>Catch-22</em>, would be proud. By NCAA law, as opposed to Dacorius Law, one is obligated to sign with the school with whom you first sign. As of this writing, the Rebels may release Law from his letter of intent due to academic issues.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-3a217cd4-084f-20c6-e879-0bb0f0cc0f41">6) Finally, no major program may have had a better day than Southern California. Less than seven weeks after being hired as head coach, Steve Sarkisian landed a pair of five-star skill players -- who appeared headed to rival UCLA -- in local talents Adoree’ Jackson and JuJu Smith. Jackson, five-foot-ten and 172 pounds, is pure lightning on the field and has a chance to compete in the long jump at the 2016 Summer Olympics. The Trojans also landed another local product, six-foot-five 360-pound offensive lineman Damien Mama. Yes, he’s a big Mama.</span></p>http://www.newsweek.com/college-footballs-signing-day-recruits-takes-some-strange-turns-228264Thu, 06 Feb 2014 12:48:22 -0500Sochi's Already a Mess, for Journalists at Leasthttp://www.newsweek.com/race-finish-will-sochi-be-ready-227977
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5639cdd8-fe01-e25c-af03-d990b288fcd4">Will Sochi be ready for the Winter Olympics by the time of the opening ceremony on Friday?</span></p><p dir="ltr">Tweets from reporters newly arrived in Sochi illustrate a haphazard, darkly funny debacle.</p><p dir="ltr">Stacy St. Clair, of the Chicago <em>Tribune</em>, found golden-brown water in her Sochi hotel when she turned on the tap. </p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en" xml:lang="en"><p>Water restored, sorta. On the bright side, I now know what very dangerous face water looks like. <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23Sochi&amp;src=hash">#Sochi</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23unfiltered&amp;src=hash">#unfiltered</a> <a href="http://t.co/sQWM0vYtyz" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">pic.twitter.com/sQWM0vYtyz</a></p>— Stacy St. Clair (@StacyStClair) <a href="https://twitter.com/StacyStClair/statuses/430550673977913344">February 4, 2014</a></blockquote><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en" xml:lang="en"><p>My hotel has no water. If restored, the front desk says, "do not use on your face because it contains something very dangerous." <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23Sochi2014&amp;src=hash">#Sochi2014</a></p>— Stacy St. Clair (@StacyStClair) <a href="https://twitter.com/StacyStClair/statuses/430536725341798402">February 4, 2014</a></blockquote><p dir="ltr">Mark MacKinnon, a senior correspondent for the <em>Globe and Mail, </em>found no lobby in his hotel.</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en" xml:lang="en"><p>For those of you asking, when there's no lobby in your hotel, you go to the owner's bedroom to check in. <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23Sochi2014&amp;src=hash">#Sochi2014</a></p>— Mark MacKinnon (@markmackinnon) <a href="https://twitter.com/markmackinnon/statuses/430703123040964609">February 4, 2014</a></blockquote><p>Vocativ came across <a href="http://www.vocativ.com/02-2014/sochi-running-pillows/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">a letter to Sochi volunteers</a> explaining that due to a pillow shortage, their pillows will be transferred to Olympic athletes. </p><blockquote><p><em>ATTENTION, DEAR COLLEAGUES! </em></p><p><em>Due to an extreme shortage of pillows for athletes who unexpectedly arrived to Olympic Village in the mountains, there will be a transfer of pillows from all apartments to the storehouse on 2 February 2014. Please be understanding. We have to help the athletes out of this bind.</em></p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">Shaun Walker, the <em>Guardian</em>'s Moscow correspondent, found his hotel's elevator broken and the stairwell firedoor locked.</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en" xml:lang="en"><p>Got back to hotel. Lift broken after half day in use. Trekked up stairs. Door to my floor (that'd be the fire door) locked. Utter farce.</p>— Shaun Walker (@shaunwalker7) <a href="https://twitter.com/shaunwalker7/statuses/430758087822438400">February 4, 2014</a></blockquote><p>National Post sports columnist Bruce Arthur <a href="http://www.canada.com/olympics/sochi-guide/sochi-facilities-still-a-work-in-progress" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">found a stairway</a> that sounds like something out of a Dr. Seuss book.</p><blockquote><p>In the Ekaterininsky Kvartal hotel, the elevator is broken and the stairway is unlit, with stairs of varying and unpredictable heights.</p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">Harry Reekie, CNN sports producer, arrived in Sochi to find that only one of the 11 rooms he said CNN booked "five months ago" was ready. Sochi 2014 Organizing Committee President Dmitry Chernyshenko initially suggested Reekie needed to just "turn back and to look at the mountains ;)" but later Chernyshenko Tweeted that media hotels are opened and "undergoing final testing."</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en" xml:lang="en"><p><a href="https://twitter.com/DChernyshenko">@DChernyshenko</a> Our media hotel is not ready Dmitry....11 rooms booked five months ago, only one ready. Please help.</p>— Harry Reekie (@HarryCNN) <a href="https://twitter.com/HarryCNN/statuses/430637857943068672">February 4, 2014</a></blockquote><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en" xml:lang="en"><p><a href="https://twitter.com/HarryCNN">@HarryCNN</a> media hotels are opened, undergoing final testing.Apologize for inconvenience.Pls contact press operations or accomodation service</p>— Dmitry Chernyshenko (@DChernyshenko) <a href="https://twitter.com/DChernyshenko/statuses/430654592981168128">February 4, 2014</a></blockquote><p dir="ltr"><em>Detroit Free Press</em> sportswriter Jo-Ann Barnas found hazards in the sidewalks.</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en" xml:lang="en"><p>Watch your step <a href="https://twitter.com/Sochi2014">@Sochi2014</a> -- I've noticed on walkway and on sidewalks that not all man holes are always covered. <a href="http://t.co/a5Nv4wu5iA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">pic.twitter.com/a5Nv4wu5iA</a></p>— Jo-Ann Barnas (@JoAnnBarnas) <a href="https://twitter.com/JoAnnBarnas/statuses/429604249228439552">February 1, 2014</a></blockquote><p dir="ltr">Photographer Joerg Reuter's saga of searching for an acceptable hotel room was <a href="http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2014/02/01/4656000/sochi-organizers-only-6-of-9-media.html#.UvJiXPldWT9" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">full of misadventure</a>.</p><blockquote><p>"The outdoor area and floors/staircase/elevator inside were still under construction and completely dirty," Reuter wrote, adding that the room he was shown "had no light in the main room, the water out of the tap was yellow/brown, the air conditioning, TV, kitchenware were all not working ... Beside this the room was totally dirty and everywhere covered with dust."</p><p>The next room was worse.</p><p>"In some rooms you actually saw that there are still the construction workers sleeping and living," he wrote.</p><p>Seeing the dog walk out of the third room he was shown was a step too far.</p><p>"When I came out of the elevator, there was the dog. I said, 'Right, that's it,'" Reuter told The Associated Press.</p></blockquote><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5639cdd8-fe01-e25c-af03-d990b288fcd4">According to a </span>New York Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/04/sports/olympics/sochi-remains-a-work-in-progress-as-games-draw-near.html?ref=sports" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">reporter</a> in Sochi, the Olympic landmarks are still under construction and the scene is a "peculiar mix of grandiosity and bungling," where a lit-up Christmas tree still adorns a hotel lobby, and an employee shrugs and offers "It's Russia!" as an explanation.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5639cdd8-fe01-e25c-af03-d990b288fcd4">"There are unfinished hotels, half-finished stores and a mall where the only shop that is open and thriving is a Cinnabon," the reporter writes.</span>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/02/04/24sochiconstruction3.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="1448" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2014/02/04/24sochiconstruction3.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/02/04/24sochiconstruction3.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2014/02/04/24sochiconstruction3.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2014/02/04/24sochiconstruction3.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2014/02/04/24sochiconstruction3.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="1448" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/02/04/24sochiconstruction3.jpg" alt="2.4_sochi_construction_3" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Julian Finney/Getty </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5639cdd8-fe01-e25c-af03-d990b288fcd4">The Sochi Games are the most expensive Olympics ever staged. Government watchdog Alexey Navalny pegs their total cost at </span><a href="http://sochi.fbk.info/en/price/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">$46 billion</a> (and others project up to <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-02/the-2014-winter-olympics-in-sochi-cost-51-billion" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">$5 billion </a>more). That surpasses even the <a href="http://www.boston.com/sports/articles/2008/08/09/sparkling_display/?page=2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">$43 billion</a> spent on the 2008 summer Games in Beijing, a far larger production that itself broke the Olympic spending record.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5639cdd8-fe01-e25c-af03-d990b288fcd4">The Sochi Games have been plagued from the start. There are accusations of </span><a href="http://www.newsweek.com/sochi-games-already-take-gold-medal-embezzlement-227247">embezzlement on a massive scale</a>. Now, just days before the first athletes start competing, it is clear the facilities are not finished.
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/02/04/24sochiconstruction4.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="637" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2014/02/04/24sochiconstruction4.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/02/04/24sochiconstruction4.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2014/02/04/24sochiconstruction4.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2014/02/04/24sochiconstruction4.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2014/02/04/24sochiconstruction4.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="637" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/02/04/24sochiconstruction4.jpg" alt="2.4_sochi_construction_4" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Gary Hershorn/Reuters </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5639cdd8-fe01-e25c-af03-d990b288fcd4">The </span>Times reporter lists the glitches. He inadvertently pulled off the handles of two doors in the poorly finished Bolshoy Ice Dome. A man walked into his hotel room at three in the morning, because he has been assigned the same room. The bus ride to the main media center offers little more than a vista of "a lot of dirt fields, dotted with newly planted trees, kept upright with twine."</p><p>Some errors are comic. A BBC reporter posted <a href="https://twitter.com/BBCSteveR/statuses/425247559934676992">an image</a> of a double toilet--two toilet bowls in one stall--at the Olympic Biathlon Center. After that image went viral, the bowls were quickly replaced by <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/double-toilet-stall-gone-sochi-2014-1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">three free-standing cabinets</a>. Later, a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/02/02/the-story-of-the-sochi-double-toilet-wont-stop-running/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">second double toilet bowl</a> was discovered by an Associated Press reporter in the Olympic media center. A <a href="http://deadspin.com/the-sochi-double-toilets-are-real-1515710910" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">photo</a> of a (possibly third?) pair of double toilets in action recently surfaced.
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/02/04/24sochiconstruction2.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="575" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2014/02/04/24sochiconstruction2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/02/04/24sochiconstruction2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2014/02/04/24sochiconstruction2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2014/02/04/24sochiconstruction2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2014/02/04/24sochiconstruction2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="575" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/02/04/24sochiconstruction2.jpg" alt="2.4_sochi_construction_2" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Lars Baron/Getty </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5639cdd8-fe01-e25c-af03-d990b288fcd4">A </span><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/sochi-trash-poor-construction-photos-2014-1%20" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">series of photos</a> taken January 23 show Sochi strewn with trash, huge piles of construction debris a mile from the Olympic park, and a half-finished hotel with metal studs bristling vertically out of its concrete walls.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5639cdd8-fe01-e25c-af03-d990b288fcd4">With the opening ceremonies just two days away, the world waits to see whether the Russian organizers can fix their glitches in time.</span></p>http://www.newsweek.com/race-finish-will-sochi-be-ready-227977Tue, 04 Feb 2014 13:21:16 -0500Orange Crushed: Seattle Seahawks Pulp Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIIIhttp://www.newsweek.com/orange-crushed-seattle-seahawks-pulp-denver-broncos-super-bowl-xlviii-227737
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5016885a-f808-ba15-7540-a070799326e6">Give the Denver Broncos credit: In the first 12 seconds of Super Bowl XLVIII, they reminded every viewer what the term “harbinger” means. </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5016885a-f808-ba15-7540-a070799326e6">On the game’s first play from scrimmage, the Broncos offense, a unit that had put up historic numbers during the 2013 season, scored two points—for the Seattle Seahawks. As quarterback Peyton Manning took a few steps from his shotgun position toward the line of scrimmage at the 14-yard line to call an audible, center Manny Ramirez snapped the ball past his right ear lobe—“Oma-god!”—and into the end zone. A sign of the beat-down to come.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5016885a-f808-ba15-7540-a070799326e6">There remained 59:48 to play in the contest, but this one was already over. The Broncos allowed a safety, threw an interception that would be returned 69 yards for a touchdown, and allowed a kickoff to be returned 87 yards for a touchdown before ever scoring any points for </span>their side. The team that had scored more points (606) in one season than any in NFL history, with the quarterback who had thrown more touchdown passes (55) and for more yardage (5,447) than any player ever had in an NFL season, trailed 36-0 after nearly three quarters and one odd and forgettable Bruno Mars/Red Hot Chili Peppers halftime collaboration.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5016885a-f808-ba15-7540-a070799326e6">Give it away, give it away now</span>, indeed.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5016885a-f808-ba15-7540-a070799326e6">The Broncos were feckless, committing four turnovers, while the Seahawks were friskier than a puppy in a Budweiser ad. Mirroring the boundless enthusiasm of their boyishly dynamic 62-year-old coach, Pete Carroll, the Seahawks consistently outran, out-hit and, consequently, outscored the Broncos. For Broncos fans, this was the least productive three-plus hours anyone in the state of New Jersey has spent since that government-induced traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5016885a-f808-ba15-7540-a070799326e6">It was an intriguingly unique game, in so many ways. The final score for example. In some nine-plus decades of games in the history of the National Football League, no contest had ever ended with a final score of 43-8. Manning threw a Super Bowl-record 34 completions, and Bronco wideout Demaryius Thomas caught a Super Bowl-record 13 of them, but so what? The enduring image of Denver’s passing game from XLVIII will be all those underneath routes netting an average of 5.7 yards per play. The Broncos offense threw a flurry of jabs, but very rarely landed a punch.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5016885a-f808-ba15-7540-a070799326e6">There’s also the Groundhog Day aspect. Manning once again lost a Super Bowl game in which he threw a pick-six, in which the opposing quarterback stood less than six-feet tall, and in which his team was embarrassed on the post-halftime kickoff. You almost expected Ned Reyerson—”Needlenose Ned”—to shake his hand immediately after the game.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5016885a-f808-ba15-7540-a070799326e6">Everyone worried that the weather would be a factor, but NFL commissioner Roger Goodell may have friends in very high, even ethereal places. Sandwiched between a week in which temps on some days never exceeded 20 degrees and a post-game Monday that could include seven inches of snow in the New York metropolitan area, it was 49 degrees at kickoff. Balmy? Not exactly, but former Jet quarterback Joe Namath, who executed the pre-game coin toss in a mink fur, was comically overdressed.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5016885a-f808-ba15-7540-a070799326e6">Broadway Joe flipped the coin into the air before the Seahawks even called “heads” or “tails.” Can a quarterback 44 years removed from his most recent Super Bowl experience be flagged for a false start?</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5016885a-f808-ba15-7540-a070799326e6">As for long-term harbingers, well, Super Bowl XLVIII could serve as one for the next half-decade or so of the NFL. The franchise from the Pacific Northwest had no player on its roster with previous Super Bowl experience, and yet it played a consummately composed, nearly error-free game (the Seahawks became the first Super Bowl champion in 48 iterations to not commit a turnover). The average age of its players is 26, which made it the second-youngest Super Bowl roster in NFL history. Other youth-oriented Super Bowl-winning teams include the 1974 Pittsburgh Steelers and the 1981 San Francisco 49ers. Both of those teams went on to win four Super Bowls with largely the same cast.</span></p><p dir="ltr"> Carroll’s mantra has long been “Win Forever,” and this Seattle team, with preternaturally poised second-year quarterback Russell Wilson (just 25) is poised to do just that. These players are uncommonly bonded with their holistic, good vibes coach, and the fruition of that bond was readily apparent at MetLife Stadium. As Wilson noted afterward, remembering conversations he and his father, now deceased, used to have when he was a boy, “My dad used to always say, ‘Russell, why not you?’”</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-5016885a-f808-ba15-7540-a070799326e6">Why not, indeed?</span></p>http://www.newsweek.com/orange-crushed-seattle-seahawks-pulp-denver-broncos-super-bowl-xlviii-227737Mon, 03 Feb 2014 08:53:13 -0500America Hates Its Gifted Kidshttp://www.newsweek.com/america-hates-its-gifted-kids-226327
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-3e697191-9ca9-382d-ce6e-79895ce7f418">It’s no secret that when it comes to education, America gets a D-minus. In the </span><a href="http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2012/index.asp" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">most recent global tests</a> – scored on a 1,000-point scale – the U.S. scored a 481 in math, 497 in science, and 498 in reading comprehension. In comparison, international averages were 494, 501, and 496, and the U.S. lags well behind the world’s leaders, a list which includes some of the usual suspects like China, Japan and the Netherlands, but also has Latvia, Slovenia and Vietnam.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-3e697191-9ca9-382d-ce6e-79895ce7f418">Why is the world’s largest economy so bad at teaching its children? One growing school of thought is that the U.S. education system, in its laudable quest to make sure the worst students reach minimal standards, is cheating its best pupils. </span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-3e697191-9ca9-382d-ce6e-79895ce7f418">“Gifted children are a precious human-capital resource,” said David Lubinski, a professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University, in a recent </span><a href="http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2014/01/gifted-children-study/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">news release</a>. They are the “future creators of modern culture and leaders in business, health care, law, the professoriate, and STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics].” With fellow researcher Camilla Benbow, Lubinski’s team at Vanderbilt is tracking some of our country’s best and brightest. His project, known as the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), although something of a misnomer, since it tests verbal abilities as well, began in 1971 at Julian Stanley’s lab at Johns Hopkins. From there it moved to Iowa State in 1986, and then again to Vanderbilt in 1998, where it has been ever since.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-3e697191-9ca9-382d-ce6e-79895ce7f418">His formerly precocious youths are now age 38, full-fledged adults who, according to Lubinski’s </span><a href="https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/Kell-Lubinski-Benbow-20132.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">latest findings</a>, have had success in a wide range of careers, from law and medicine to arts and humanities, and to engineering, business and pedagogy. Of the 320 participants, 203 earned at least a master’s degree. And 142 of them (44 percent) earned doctoral degrees, a ratio far higher than that of the average population, which adds the coveted Ph. D. initials at a rate of only 2 percent. Clearly, these kids are going places.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-3e697191-9ca9-382d-ce6e-79895ce7f418">That’s great news, but these kids appear to have excelled despite their education. For years, teachers have operated under the assumption that gifted children – the tiny group smarter than 99.99 percent of their peers – need and deserve less attention than the kids in remedial classes. When the research team looked back at Stanley’s original assessments of classroom dynamics, they found that teachers more or less ignored gifted children, instead teaching to a one-size-fits-all curriculum that catered to the lowest common denominator.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-3e697191-9ca9-382d-ce6e-79895ce7f418">It still happens today. A 2008</span><a href="http://www.nagc.org/uploadedFiles/News_Room/NAGC_Advocacy_in_the_News/Fordham.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> report</a> found that the controversial No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 indeed helped low-achieving students rise to meet a more rigorous course load, but shifted teachers’ sights away from the gifted kids, who seemed capable of helping themselves stay on track.</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-3e697191-9ca9-382d-ce6e-79895ce7f418">Lubinski argues that gifted children are hurt by the race to the middle. “There has to be flexibility,” he told </span>Newsweek. “That is the message I’d give to teachers.” But how can a teacher realistically instruct a classroom in which some students are light years ahead?</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-3e697191-9ca9-382d-ce6e-79895ce7f418">One solution is to group children by their rate of learning, rather than chronological age. For example, a gifted 9-year-old may share a geometry class with high school freshmen. A 15-year-old may hit the advanced placement ceiling at his high school, and head over to the local community college to take classes. The key is to personalize an individual’s education, even in preschool: If someone is a whiz at differential calculus but can’t discern between her pronouns and her prepositions, maybe moving her out of the 11th grade entirely isn’t the best move. Don’t raise the entire ceiling, in other words – just remove a few tiles.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-3e697191-9ca9-382d-ce6e-79895ce7f418">Megan Tomlinson, a 10th-grade English and Journalism teacher at High School for Public Service in Brooklyn, N.Y., says she has seen too many talented students have their potential squandered because their school doesn’t foster growth. “It's frustrating, as a teacher, to watch students who could and should be challenging themselves, earning great grades, and potentially being rewarded with scholarships and entry into great colleges simply settle for doing ‘well enough’ to earn good grades because they're bored, unmotivated or have learned how to ‘do school’ without putting forth much effort,” she said.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-3e697191-9ca9-382d-ce6e-79895ce7f418">Tomlinson tries to accommodate both ends of the spectrum by offering variations of each assignment, tailored to a student’s ability. “Other times, I pull gifted students aside privately and explain that because of their potential and ability, I expect them to complete the more advanced assignment,” she said. “If they are reluctant, I may reach out to parents for support.”</span></p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-3e697191-9ca9-382d-ce6e-79895ce7f418">Tomlinson’s frustrations, much like those experienced by many of the nation’s public school teachers, are compounded by the larger forces acting on the environment in which she works. </span>Figures released early last year showed 77 percent of entrants into City University of New York schools needed remediation math in order to enroll. But Tomlinson has been able to work within the constraints by balancing her time to ensure uplift on both ends. “I'm extremely grateful to be working at a school that consistently reminds me to continue to push my gifted and talented students,” she said. “They do not necessarily have the motivation, skills or access to outlets for growth to succeed on their own. They need me, too.”</p><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-3e697191-9ca9-382d-ce6e-79895ce7f418">After all, a gifted 12-year-old is still a 12-year-old.</span></p><p><span id="docs-internal-guid-3e697191-9ca9-382d-ce6e-79895ce7f418">But for every Tomlinson, there will be a teacher (or five) who can’t manage the delicate balance, or is uncomfortable teaching outside the norm. For the U.S. to reach the upper echelons of educational attainment in an increasingly competitive global environment, it probably needs change that comes from both the bottom, through teachers like Tomlinson, and the top, from serious education reform focused on cultivating intellectual achievement. Before innovative ideas like Lubinski’s can take hold, there needs to be a consensus among all the stakeholders that winning is important, and it isn’t enough to simply enter the race. </span></p><p><em>This story has been corrected to reflect that figures released early last year showed 77 percent of entrants into City University of New York schools needed remediation math in order to enroll.</em></p>http://www.newsweek.com/america-hates-its-gifted-kids-226327Thu, 16 Jan 2014 15:08:05 -0500The Surprising Connection Between Rhythm and Readinghttp://www.newsweek.com/2013/09/20/surprising-connection-between-rhythm-and-reading-237990.html
<p>Scientists are now confirming what poets have known all along. There is an intimate link between language, learning, and music, or, more specifically, rhythm. Nina Kraus and her colleagues at the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory of Northwestern University are now looking at that phenomenon a little more closely. They have published numerous papers that show musical training improves several different brain functions. But their latest study focuses specifically on the relationship between rhythm, speech recognition, and reading. They got together 100 teenagers, stuck wires all over their heads to measure their brain waves, then asked them to tap their fingers to the beat of a metronome. Over the course of their tests they found those who had more musical training not only kept better time, but had better neural responses to speech. Conversely, kids who were poor readers tended to have difficulty tapping a consistent beat. Kraus suggests that musical training could help these poor readers maintain focus and grasp meaning more easily. As it happens, the music-streaming service Spotify has publicized a separate report that implies that listening to the right music while studying (classical for math; rock for humanities) helps improve concentration and grades. Kind of makes you want to clap your hands.</p>http://www.newsweek.com/2013/09/20/surprising-connection-between-rhythm-and-reading-237990.htmlFri, 20 Sep 2013 05:45:00 -0400Post-Katrina, the Great New Orleans Charter Tryouthttp://www.newsweek.com/2013/09/20/post-katrina-great-new-orleans-charter-tryout-237968.html
<p>Long before Sci Academy, a charter school in New Orleans, had graduated its first senior class, the school was being heaped with accolades.</p><p>In September 2010, when Sci Academy was just two years old, its 200 excited students—then all freshmen and sophomores—filed into Greater St. Stephen Baptist church, next door to the school. Together with local dignitaries, journalists, and a brass band, the students watched on jumbo screens as the leaders of six charter schools from around the country appeared on <i>The Oprah Winfrey Show.</i> At the end of the show, they watched as Oprah handed each charter-school leader—including Ben Marcovitz, Sci Academy’s founder—a $1 million check.</p><p>Sci Academy is a flagship charter school and a model of the new data-driven, business-infused approach to education that has reached its apotheosis in New Orleans. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, education reformers swept away what remained of the traditional public schools in what had been one of the nation’s lowest-performing districts. In their place, charters promised choice and increased accountability. More than 75 percent of New Orleans kids landed in schools controlled by the so-called Recovery School District, which was heavily dominated by charter schools.</p><p>“This transformation of the New Orleans educational system may turn out to be the most significant national development in education since desegregation,” wrote Neerav Kingsland, the CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, the city’s leading venture-philanthropy group incubating local charter schools, a year ago. “New Orleans students have access to educational opportunities that are far superior to any in recent memory.”</p><p>But eight years after Hurricane Katrina, there is evidence that the picture is far more complicated. Seventy-nine percent of RSD charters are still rated D or F by the Louisiana Department of Education. (To be sure, some charter operators argue that the grading system in Louisiana, which keeps moving the bar upward, doesn’t sufficiently capture the improvements schools have achieved.) Sci is one of two RSD high schools to earn a B; there are no A-rated open-admission schools. In a school system with about 42,000 mostly poor African-American kids, every year thousands are out of school at any given time—because they are on suspension, have dropped out, or are incarcerated. Even at successful schools, such as the highly regarded Sci Academy, large numbers of students never make it to graduation, and others are unlikely to make it through college.</p><p>Figuring out what has taken place in the New Orleans schools is not just a matter of interest to local residents. From cities like New York to towns like Muskegon Heights, Michigan, market-style reforms have been widely touted as the answer to America’s educational woes. (A recent editorial in the <i>St. Louis Post-Dispatch</i> called for local education reformers to “adopt the Louisiana model.”) New Orleans tells us a lot about what these reforms look like in practice. And the current reality of the city’s schools should be enough to give pause to even the most passionate charter supporters.</p><p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_0.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="1442" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_0.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_0.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_0.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_0.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_0.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="1442" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_0.jpg" alt="Schools Gabo" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
Sci is one of two RSD high schools to earn a B; there are no A-rated open-admission schools in New Orleans. </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p><strong>WITH ITS</strong> chain-link fence and campus of modular buildings—the result of a continuing post–Hurricane Katrina building shortage—Sci Academy doesn’t look much like a model school. Freshmen, wearing the polo shirts and khakis of the school uniform, are required to walk along straight red lines that snake through the school’s breezeways. Placards bearing slogans, such as “No Short Cuts; No Excuses” and “Go Above and Beyond,” hang overhead.</p><p>Everything at Sci Academy is carefully choreographed to maintain discipline and a laserlike focus on the school’s principal mission, which is to get every student into college. Each morning, at 8 a.m., the teachers, almost all white and in their 20s, gather for a rousing thigh-slapping, hand-clapping, rap-chanting staff revival meeting, the beginning of what will be, for most, a 14- to 16-hour workday. Students arrive a half hour later, and if asked “Why are you here?” and “What will it take?” are expected to respond “To learn,” followed by a recitation of the school’s six core values: “achievement, respect, responsibility, perseverance, teamwork, and enthusiasm.”</p><p>Both curriculum and behavior are meticulously scripted. As kids file into class, a teacher hands them their “entry ticket,” a survey that helps determine how much students retained from the previous class. An “exit ticket” distributed at the end of each class establishes how much kids have absorbed. Information from the exit tickets, as well as attendance, demerits for bad behavior, and “Sci bucks” for good behavior, are keyed into the Sci software system by teachers every night to help monitor both student and teacher performance.</p><p>After the storm, the state fired the city’s unionized teachers, who were mostly middle-aged African-Americans, an action that has been challenged in court. While a few schools have hired back teachers who worked in the pre-Katrina schools, the city now relies heavily on inexperienced educators—mostly young, white, and from out of town—who are willing, at least in the short run, to put in grueling hours. But at many schools, including Sci Academy, plenty of teachers last for less than two years. In New Orleans, teachers with certifications from Teach for America number close to 400, five times the level a few years ago. Within the RSD, in 2011, 42 percent of teachers had less than three years of experience; 22 percent have spent just one year or less in the classroom, according to “The State of Public Education in New Orleans,” a 2012 report by the pro-charter Cowen Institute at Tulane University.</p><p>In part to help with this lack of experience, charter schools train teachers in highly regimented routines that help them keep control of their classrooms. The city’s charter-school advocates argue that in the aftermath of the storm, when charter operators had to scale up quickly, they needed to start with basics: first order and security, then skill building. “Kids expect high school to be dangerous. They come to school with their backs up,” explains Sci Academy’s Marcovitz, a graduate of the elite Maret school in Washington, D.C., and Yale University. He says the routines—which are borrowed from methods pioneered by KIPP, a national charter chain that also operates schools in New Orleans—are intended to keep students focused and feeling safe.</p><p class="parallax">
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_1.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_1.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_1.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_1.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_1.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_1.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_1.jpg" alt="Schools Gabo" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
The city now relies heavily on inexperienced educators—mostly young, white, and from out of town—who are willing, at least in the short run, to put in grueling hours. </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Maile Lani Photography/FirstLine Schools </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>In one English class last fall, a teacher who had been at Sci for about a year held forth on the fine points of grammar, including the subtle difference between modal and auxiliary verbs. As a few heads drifted downward, she employed a popular charter-school management routine to hold the class’s attention. “SPARK check!” she called. The acronym stands for sit straight; pencil to paper (or place hands folded in front); ask and answer questions; respect; and keep tracking the speaker.</p><p>“Heads up, sit straight—15 seconds to go,” she said, trying to get her students’ attention.</p><p>“All scholars please raise your homework in THREE, TWO, ONE. We need to set a goal around homework completion. I only see about one third complete homework.”</p><p>It’s a long way from the city’s charter-school roots. In the 1990s, the city’s first charter school, New Orleans Charter Middle School, was built on a progressive curriculum that used experiential projects and electives, such as bicycle repair and African dance, to foster a love of learning. The school became the most highly rated nonselective school in the city before it was devastated during Hurricane Katrina. But while its founders went on to create FirstLine, now one of the leading charter operators in New Orleans, the progressive roots of the charter movement have been swamped by the new realities of a competitive charter marketplace.</p><p>Now, driven by both government policy and philanthropic funding—which rewards schools for preparing students for college and penalizes those that don’t—most charter high schools in New Orleans describe themselves as “college prep.” This may seem an admirable goal. But in a school system where the number of eighth graders who passed the end-of-course tests required to get into high school has, according to the Cowen Institute, virtually stagnated at about 60 percent, the push toward college leaves behind many of the most disadvantaged kids, who already face enormous hurdles because of poverty, parental abandonment, and one of the highest rates of gun violence in the nation. For some of these students, college is not necessarily a realistic goal.</p><p>Of course, New Orleans had been a troubled school district long before Katrina. While schools were improving before the storm, charter advocates point to a faster rate of improvement in the years since. Yet pre- and post-Katrina comparisons are difficult, in large part because of a surge in funding for charters post-Katrina. (Andre Perry, an expert on education who ran a charter-school network in New Orleans, and Michael Schwam-Baird, an education researcher, estimate that per-pupil funding in the 2006–07 and 2007–08 school years was about double what it had been in the two years immediately preceding the hurricane and 50 to 100 percent greater than it was for the rest of Louisiana during the same period.)</p><p>One undeniable reality is that negotiating the new charter-dominated system has been complicated for students; it also has favored those who have the most parental support. The luckiest are students like Eddie Barnes, a star at Sci Academy, whose mother was able to navigate the highly confusing application process that, especially in the early years of the RSD, stumped many parents. (Part of what makes the New Orleans school system so complicated is that it is essentially two systems: the smaller, high-performing, mostly selective schools, which were never taken over by the state—though many were converted to charters—and the 60 or so schools within the RSD.)</p><p>Like most of his classmates, Eddie came to Sci Academy after a traumatic post-Katrina odyssey that began when he was 11 and fled the city with his parents and younger brothers, first for Texas and, eventually, Georgia. When Eddie’s mother, Anya Barnes, decided to return to New Orleans in 2008, her husband, the father of her two youngest sons, didn’t join her. So, the family returned to New Orleans fatherless, arriving three months after the start of Eddie’s freshman year. That was during the chaotic first years of the RSD, when parents had to apply to every charter school individually, which led to widespread allegations that schools cherry-picked their students. (Last year the RSD instituted a streamlined application process.)</p><p>Eddie and his mother made the rounds of the few RSD schools that still had openings and eventually found their way to Sci Academy, which had just enrolled its first class. (The two other schools Eddie tried have since been closed or taken over.) Anya Barnes, who had started college but never finished, was “inspired by Sci” and its college-prep mission. Eddie, in turn, was inspired by his mother and, three years later, wrote his college essay about the role she had played in his academic achievements.</p><p>In school, Eddie was a class leader. At 160 pounds and 5 feet 8 inches, he became captain of the fledgling basketball and football teams. He won Mr. Sci Academy, an award given to the student who exemplifies the cooperative values of the school. He was voted prom king. And he excelled academically: in his junior year, Eddie’s standardized test scores met the testing requirements for a scholarship to a Louisiana state school, as well as for a college trip to the East Coast that Sci’s college-placement officer was organizing.</p><p>By the time Eddie and his classmates were ready to graduate in the spring of 2012, the class seemed to offer vindication not only for the school’s no-excuses college-prep approach, but for the entire New Orleans charter model. Almost all the graduating seniors at Sci Academy—close to 95 percent—had been accepted at college. Eddie and a half dozen of his classmates would be returning to the East Coast, where they had won scholarships to attend schools like Middlebury, Wesleyan, Amherst, and Bard.</p><p>Yet, the results were not necessarily all they seemed—for either the Sci Academy kids who won college acceptances or the kids who never made it to graduation.</p><p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_2.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_2.jpg" alt="Schools Gabo" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
At many schools, including Sci Academy, plenty of teachers last for less than two years. </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Sci Academy </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p><strong>DURING THE</strong> summer of 2010, Sci Academy founder Ben Marcovitz recruited Allie Levey, an assistant dean of admissions at Wesleyan University, to be Sci’s college counselor and to make sure his graduates would get into college. The idea, says Levey, who was 25 at the time, was for him to become a kind of “double agent” who knew the ins and outs of admissions at elite colleges, a process he could help top Sci Academy students navigate.</p><p>Like Marcovitz, Levey had attended a D.C.-area private school and an elite college—Sidwell Friends and Wesleyan, in Levey’s case. Marcovitz, says Levey, “wants this to be like a group of people who believe.”</p><p>Levey, boyish and intense, bought into the Sci Academy approach. At morning meetings, he could always be seen leading fellow faculty members in the motivational chants and rallying students. But the task was daunting from the start. “I’ll never forget the first time they showed me the spreadsheet of the kids’ GPAs and ACT scores going into senior year,” says Levey. “I was like, there’s no way.” The average ACT score was 17, well below the cutoff for a state scholarship, which was 20, in 2012, out of a possible 36. Levey says he was certain he had taken on an impossible task.</p><p>But Levey and Marcovitz were determined. Levey organized college trips, mentored the seniors, and worked the phones to his former college-admissions colleagues. Meanwhile, Sci Academy pulled out the stops when it came to standardized tests. In the spring, classes were regularly suspended for added studying. Seniors who scored below 20 on their ACT spent three weeks being tutored by Alex Gershanik, the local “test-prep guru,” at a cost, to Sci Academy, of $1,000 per student.</p><p>By the time Sci Academy’s first senior class was about to graduate, Levey’s doubts were deepening—about both the school’s college-for-all mission and the toll his work was having on his personal life. By the following spring, less than two years after joining Sci Academy, Levey decided to resign. “I believe every member of [the] school leadership team deeply in their hearts wants to make this sustainable,” said Levey shortly before submitting his resignation, visibly saddened. “I also know that that’s not possible right now.”</p><p>Indeed, behind Sci Academy’s impressive college-acceptance rate were some troubling numbers. The school’s first graduating class was 37 percent smaller than the same class had been in the ninth grade—even though some students came to the school after freshman year and filled seats left vacant by departing students. The attrition rate has improved; the class of 2013 was 28 percent smaller than it had been in the ninth grade. But Sci Academy’s out-of-school suspension rate has been rising, reaching 49 percent in 2012, the second highest in the city and one reason kids transferred to other schools. Sci Academy says that its efforts to reduce suspensions by loosening some rules led to increased violence, including weapons on campus, which, in turn, led to a spike in suspensions.</p><p>Even kids who make it through high school and into college face hurdles. While the majority of Sci Academy’s graduates enrolled in four-year colleges in the fall of 2012, over 10 percent had either dropped out or transferred to junior colleges within six months of matriculating. (Marcovitz acknowledges that the school needs to both improve student attrition and help its graduates stay in college. Sci Academy recently appointed “college captains,” who will keep in touch with classmates and alert the school to any problems kids are having in college.)</p><p>Another fact that troubled Levey was student debt: the average Sci Academy student, if he or she completes college, will graduate with $22,000 to $27,000 in debt, according to Levey, even if the student is eligible for state or federal aid. Meanwhile, students who drop out will leave with thousands of dollars in loans. Says Levey: “A kid who is barely passing, but qualifies for a four-year college, who really doesn’t have any academic interests—why am I having them mark general studies on their college application, why? Or nursing or chemical engineering?”</p><p class="parallax">
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_3.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_3.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_3.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_3.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_3.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_3.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_3.jpg" alt="Schools Gabo" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
The progressive roots of the charter movement have been swamped by the new realities of a competitive charter marketplace. </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Maile Lani Photography/FirstLine Schools </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>Take the case of a student named Trevon, who, before enrolling at Sci Academy in his senior year, attended two other New Orleans charter high schools. The first declined to reenroll him in his sophomore year. The second was, by most accounts, a chaotic failure and closed after his junior year. Trevon fell behind a grade level and didn’t learn to write a research paper until late in his senior year. As recently as last spring, Trevon wasn’t sure college was for him; he was thinking of enlisting in the Army instead.</p><p>Encouraged by Sci Academy’s college-prep culture and after months of test prep, including a stint with the test-prep guru, Trevon eked out an 18 on his ACT—not enough for a state scholarship. But with a student loan, Trevon finally decided to enroll at Southern University at New Orleans for this fall. Even though the college has one of the nation’s lowest graduation rates—8 percent in 2009—Levey steered him and several classmates to SUNO because it is “cheap,” as Levey says; with work-study and living at home, he would have to take out no more than $1,000 or so per year in loans.</p><p>A Sci Academy administrator helped him register and pick a major—entrepreneurship—but two weeks into the fall semester, Trevon, unsure how to navigate a problem with his student loans, had neither purchased his books nor accessed Blackboard, the online portal where professors post class materials.</p><p><strong>THERE IS</strong> no plan B in the college-for-all charter universe, in part because both the state’s accountability systems and philanthropists’ expectations are based on how successful the schools are in qualifying kids for college.</p><p>Louisiana’s school grading system rewards those whose students graduate in four years and score well on college-entry tests such as the ACT and advanced-placement tests. It penalizes schools—by giving them lower grades—if students take longer to graduate or perform poorly on the college-placement tests. Schools typically are reviewed every five years, but can be closed down after three if they do not meet the charter’s goals. In the 2010–11 school year alone, 10 New Orleans schools were closed or taken over, according to Research on Reforms, a local research and advocacy organization. The process left hundreds of kids in ninth to 12th grades scrambling to find space at a new school.</p><p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_4.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_4.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_4.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_4.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_4.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_4.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_4.jpg" alt="Schools Gabo" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
Pre- and post-Katrina comparisons are difficult, in large part because of a surge in funding for charters post-Katrina. </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Sci Academy </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>Paradoxically, as New Orleans encourages existing charters to take over the last of the schools the RSD directly runs, the charter system is finally being forced to confront the flaws in its one-size-fits-all college-prep model. Some of the city’s charter schools have begun experimenting with alternatives, like vocational programs and so-called alternative schools designed specifically to help students who have struggled in, or dropped out of, school. This spring, John White, Louisiana’s superintendent of education, in a notable departure from the state’s college-for-all mantra, unveiled a proposal to revamp high school diplomas by creating a vocational track that would qualify graduates for technical careers. Although Louisiana already has a “career diploma,” it is widely seen as a dead-end certification, because it neither prepares students for college nor provides them with specialized training.</p><p>But for these experiments to work, the incentives will have to change. Under the current accountability criteria, alternative schools will always score an F and will eventually be closed, argues Elizabeth Ostberg, former head of human resources at FirstLine and founder of the NET, a new alternative school that got an F on its first 2012–13 report card.</p><p>“Why would you do this if you care about your school’s accountability score?” asks Jay Altman, the CEO of FirstLine, who gave the NET space at one of his schools during its first year of operation and is now piloting a vocational program as part of a takeover of Joseph S. Clark, a historic but failing high school.</p><p>Moreover, it is widely believed that private donors want to see as many students as possible go to college—an understandable inclination, but one that isn’t helpful for all kids. (Private donors can equal one third of a charter school’s budget: for Sci Academy, in 2011, $1.3 million of its $3.9 million budget came from private donations.) Ostberg, for instance, is convinced that her school was initially denied funding by a major foundation because the school’s mission did not emphasize college prep. It finally got the money, she says, in part by convincing the foundation that if New Orleans is to have a “successful education system,” it has to “address” the kids who aren’t going to college. “If we build great alternative schools, our college-prep schools will be better,” she says.</p><p>Many students are still falling through the cracks. In 2010, the year Ostberg received her charter for the NET, an estimated 4,000 teens, about 10 percent of the city’s entire student population, were not in school. (The numbers are hard to pin down. While a Louisiana state report that same year put the dropout rate at 5.7 percent, a 2013 report by the Louisiana Legislative Auditor found that the state’s DOE “no longer conducts on-site audits or reviews that help ensure the electronic data in its systems is accurate.”)</p><p>The premise of the New Orleans charter-school experiment is that charters can educate all children. However, the experience of kids like Lawrence Melrose, another Sci Academy student, does not support that claim. Now 18, Lawrence’s life is a testament to both high levels of social dysfunction, including poverty and violence, and the inability of some charter schools to meet the needs of the most disadvantaged kids.</p><p>It is hard to know when Lawrence’s life began to spin out of control. It may have been when his grandmother who raised him was diagnosed with cancer and he began shuttling back and forth between Georgia, where the family moved after Hurricane Katrina, and his great-uncle Shelton Joseph’s house in New Orleans. It may have been during a basketball game, near his great-uncle’s house, on a hot August day of his 14th year, when another kid shot him in the back, nearly killing him. Or it may have been during his dizzying spin through half a dozen struggling RSD schools in the two years before he enrolled at Sci Academy.</p><p>During the weeks Lawrence spent at Children’s Hospital recovering from his gunshot wound, a report on his neuropsychological state concluded that Lawrence “appears to have the skills necessary to be a productive member of society,” but also that he should continue to receive “special-education services at the highest level possible.”</p><p>A year later, in 2010, Lawrence enrolled as a freshman at Sci Academy; he had spent two years—with multiple suspensions and expulsions—in the New Orleans system. His first months at Sci Academy were rocky. When the school celebrated Marcovitz’s appearance on <i>The Oprah Winfrey Show</i> at the church next door, Lawrence was not there; he was kept back in the school’s office.</p><p>In 2010 Lawrence became one of 10 plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center against the Louisiana Department of Education, charging that the city’s fragmented education system had resulted in “systemic failures to ensure that students with disabilities have equal access to educational services and are protected from discrimination.” (The SPLC has since petitioned the court to certify the case as a class action suit.)</p><p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_5.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="1442" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_5.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_5.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_5.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_5.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_5.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="1442" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2014/03/21/Schools%20Gabo_5.jpg" alt="Schools Gabo" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
Have the pressures and incentive systems surrounding charter schools taken public education in the direction we want it to go? </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Maile Lani Photography/FirstLine Schools </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>Of all the New Orleans schools he had attended, Sci Academy was the first that had tried to grapple with Lawrence’s problems. However, with every RSD charter school serving as its own district and required to provide all services to all kids, Sci Academy apparently did not have the resources to meet all of Lawrence’s needs. The school eventually concluded that he needed an intensive therapy program, but was unable to find one for him; as part of a statewide privatization effort that began a few years ago, Gov. Bobby Jindal had closed the last of the public hospitals that offered residential programs for adolescents with mental disabilities.</p><p>Lawrence spent less and less time at school. At 17, he was arrested for armed robbery; repeatedly found incompetent to stand trial, Lawrence spent a year and a half in jail. He finally pleaded guilty and agreed to a 10-year sentence, minus time already served.</p><p>On a recent Saturday morning, Lawrence sat behind a plexiglas barrier at Orleans Parish Prison, his jaw slightly swollen after it was broken in a jailhouse beating. Lawrence was wearing a bulky, sleeveless “suicide” smock that also covered a knife wound from another incident in the jail. Lawrence isn’t really a suicide risk, explained Chaseray Griffin, Lawrence’s SPLC advocate; placement on the suicide ward, where the inmate’s clothes are taken away, was his best chance of staying safe until he is moved to a state penitentiary.</p><p>Although Lawrence has taken classes in prison, he has not graduated. Yet, when the state of Louisiana calculates its dropout statistics, Lawrence and other incarcerated teens are not included.</p><p>It is tempting to look at Lawrence as an exception. But his case points to problems not only with the quality of individual schools in New Orleans, but also with government oversight and the incentive structure of charter schools. “State monitoring has virtually stopped,” says Margaret Lang, who retired last year as director of intervention services at the RSD. “The kids who get churned the most are those with the most disabilities and challenges.”</p><p>In New Orleans, critics argue that the pressure to show high test scores and get kids into college, combined with the broad leeway given to charter schools to suspend and expel students, means the “difficult to teach” kids have been effectively abandoned. “New ideas on how to teach disruptive and unmotivated students have not emerged from charter schools,” charges Barbara Ferguson, a former superintendent of public schools in New Orleans and a founder of Research on Reforms. “Whether the difficult-to-teach high school students are expelled by charter schools or whether they attended schools closed by the RSD, they are an outcast group, thrown into an abyss ... Neither the RSD nor the state Department of Education tracks these students to determine if they ever enter another high school.”</p><p>But even for students who don’t fall through the cracks or get expelled, it bears asking: have the pressures and incentive systems surrounding charter schools taken public education in the direction we want it to go? Anthony Recasner, a partner in founding New Orleans Charter Middle School and FirstLine, is visibly torn between his hopes for the New Orleans charter experiment and his disappointment in the distance that remains between today’s no-excuses charter-school culture and the movement’s progressive roots. “Education should be a higher-order exploration,” says Recasner, a child psychologist who left FirstLine in 2011 to become CEO of Agenda for Children, a children’s advocacy organization. The typical charter school in New Orleans “is not sustainable for the adults, not fun for kids,” says Recasner, who is one of the few African-American charter leaders in New Orleans; his own experience as a poor child raised by a single parent mirrors that of most students in the charter schools. “Is that really,” he asks, “what we want for the nation’s poor children?”</p><p><i>This article was reported in partnership with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute. It was also made possible by funding from the New World Foundation’s Civic Opportunities Initiative Network.</i></p>http://www.newsweek.com/2013/09/20/post-katrina-great-new-orleans-charter-tryout-237968.htmlFri, 20 Sep 2013 04:45:00 -0400Providence Talks’ Aims to Boost Vocabulary Through Surveillancehttp://www.newsweek.com/2013/07/24/providence-talks-aims-boost-vocabulary-through-surveillance-237760.html
<p>
<strong>IT SOUNDS</strong> like a great idea: a prize-winning project, called Providence Talks, will help children in Rhode Island boost their vocabulary skills. But it also has a creepy side. The program, which won a $5 million prize from the Bloomberg Philanthropies last March, aims to address the fact that kids in underprivileged families often hear far fewer words during the course of the day than those from more affluent backgrounds. As a result, they start kindergarten with smaller vocabularies and lower levels of comprehension. To try to fix that, the city of Providence has developed a plan to have toddlers wear little digital recorders that, for 16 hours, one day a month, will tape everything that is said to them and around them. That data is broken down so social workers and nurses can help parents help their kids, figuring out more ways to expose them to more words. It’s all voluntary, it’s free, and it’s supposed to be confidential. But it’s also going to generate a lot of data about what’s overheard in the kids’ neighborhoods. As Christine Rosen wrote recently on Slate.com, the “growing world of social-engineering surveillance” poses some “significant challenges to the future of privacy.” </p>http://www.newsweek.com/2013/07/24/providence-talks-aims-boost-vocabulary-through-surveillance-237760.htmlWed, 24 Jul 2013 04:45:00 -0400What If You Could Learn Everything?http://www.newsweek.com/2013/07/10/what-if-you-could-learn-everything-237660.html
<p>Imagine every student has a tireless personal tutor, an artificially intelligent and inexhaustible companion that magically knows everything, knows the student, and helps her learn what she needs to know. “<i>‘You guys sound like you’re from the future,’</i>” Jose Ferreira, the CEO of the education technology startup Knewton, says. “That’s the most common reaction we get from others in the industry.” </p><p>When I first met Ferreira four years ago, this kind of talk sounded like typical Silicon Valley bluster from another scruffy, boyish founder of a technology startup. Today, he can back up the kinds of breakthroughs he says his company can deliver: several million data points generated daily by each of 1 million students from elementary school through college, using Knewton’s “adaptive learning” technology to study math, reading, and other fundamentals. Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder, Facebook investor, and an early investor in Knewton, told Knewton’s staff recently that the company has two key characteristics he looks for in a deal. “Before they happen, everybody thought it was impossible. Afterwards it’s too late for anyone else, because they’ve already done it.”</p><p>Adaptive learning is an increasingly popular catchphrase denoting educational software that customizes its presentation of material from moment to moment based on the user’s input. It’s being hailed as a “revolution” by both venture capitalists and big, established education companies.</p><p>Starting this fall, Knewton’s technology will be available to the vast majority of the nation’s colleges and universities and K-12 school districts through new partnerships with three major textbook publishers: Pearson, MacMillan, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. And Ferreira’s done all this even though he says neither his investors nor his competition, to say nothing of the public or the press, really understand what Knewton can do.</p><p>But here’s the vision. Within five or 10 years, the paper textbook and mimeographed worksheet will be dead. Classroom exercises and homework—text, audio, video, games—will have shifted entirely to the iPad or equivalent. And adaptive learning will help each user find the exact right piece of content needed, in the exact right format, at the exact right time, based on previous patterns of use.</p><p>In an age of swelling class sizes, teacher layoffs, and students with a vast array of special needs and learning styles, some reformers hail these software systems as a savior that could make learning more customized and effective and teaching more efficient. While battle lines are sharp in K-12 school reform over issues from charters to the Common Core national curriculum standards, digital innovations have fans across the political spectrum for their power to engage students and bring the classroom into the 21st century.</p><p>Here’s what Ferreira thinks this software-powered learning can do. “Right now about 22 percent of the people in the world graduate high school or the equivalent. That’s pathetic. In one generation we could get close to 100 percent, almost for free.”</p><p class="parallax">
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz%20kidtech_0.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz%20kidtech_0.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz%20kidtech_0.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz%20kidtech_0.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz%20kidtech_0.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz%20kidtech_0.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz%20kidtech_0.jpg" alt="kamenetz kidtech" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
The staff at Knewton has perfected getting the right content to the right kid, at the right time, in the right format. </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Mark Abramson </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>
<strong>LIKE A</strong> lot of technology entrepreneurs, Ferreira has a personal beef with the existing education system. “I found school very boring and frustrating,” he says, his low, quick voice barely audible over the roar of air conditioners on the roof deck of Knewton’s new Union Square digs in Manhattan. The company is hiring as fast as it can. Clad in flip-flops, a T-shirt, and shorts, Ferreira presides over an office stocked with an espresso machine and several brands of beer. On the day I visit, employees have brought in bags of kale for a communal lunch.</p><p>“The factory model of education is a gargantuan bureaucracy. Some kids are good fits—I wasn’t. The system gives you bad grades and tells you you’re stupid. You don’t think, <i>if this kid’s not a good fit it could be the system’s fault</i>.”</p><blockquote class="quote"><p></p><p>All the content behind education is going to move online in the next 10 years. It’s one giant Oklahoma land grab.</p>
</blockquote><p>He inherited his rebellious streak, but his family also put tremendous pressure on him to succeed. Ferreira’s parents were native-born white Africans who came to America when he was 2, after his father’s anti-apartheid political activism, in Ferreira’s words, “got us kicked out” of South Africa. They settled in Chevy Chase, Maryland, where he attended public schools that were high quality but, to him, dull. He was the type to torment the teachers with smart-aleck questions, skip homework assignments, and cram all the material the night before the test.</p><p>After graduating from Carleton College in Minnesota, where he studied philosophy and mathematics, Ferreira faced anemic job prospects in the early-’90s recession. Living in San Francisco, he made ends meet as an SAT tutor for Kaplan, the largest test-prep company, by day, and as a poker player in casinos at night. In both roles, he delighted in playing the numbers, getting an edge over the house. “Casinos are statistics in game form. And I had started teaching because I love brainteasers. At some point I had taken every standardized test out there—the SATs, the GREs, the GMATs, the MCATs. I just took them for fun. ”</p><p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz-fe0325-kidtech-embed2.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz-fe0325-kidtech-embed2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz-fe0325-kidtech-embed2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz-fe0325-kidtech-embed2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz-fe0325-kidtech-embed2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz-fe0325-kidtech-embed2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz-fe0325-kidtech-embed2.jpg" alt="kamenetz-fe0325-kidtech-embed2" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
Using adaptive technology, students move at their own speed, so teachers can spend class time targeting individual needs. </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Joshua Lott/New York Times/Redux </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>To his parents, however, he was the black sheep. They hadn’t told the rest of the family what he was doing for a living. “One day my parents came into town to take me to dinner. My dad was worried I was a failure. My mom asked, ‘Why do you think you haven’t dated anyone in two years?’—because all my nights and weekends were spent at the poker table. Kaplan had offered me a full-time job, so I took it. I figured it was time to get serious.” Ferreira extended his love of brainteasers to the art and science of taking—and beating, and helping others beat—standardized tests. He never saw this as cheating, rather as righting an injustice for kids like himself, smart but restless, whose fates were being decided on the basis of an arbitrary three-hour test.</p><p>His confidence and love of risk, meanwhile, served him well. At one point while working for Kaplan, Ferreira discovered a flaw on the GREs that turned what was supposed to be a very technical math question into something a child could do. The vulnerability forced the Educational Testing Service, makers of the GREs, to delete an entire section of questions. They referred to the test-prep hacker privately as “the Antichrist.” “They had to pull this section of the test. They gave me credit publicly. It’s the only time they’ve ever admitted publicly that someone beat them,” he says, grinning with pride. Kaplan turned the admission from ETS into the basis of an international marketing campaign for their test-prep services. “We put that on everything we sent out after that. I mean nurses in the Philippines were getting postcards about it.” </p><blockquote class="quote"><p></p><p>As a student reads, Knewton’s system is ‘reading’ the student as well.
Hesitant or confident? Guessing blindly or taking her time?</p>
</blockquote><p>Ferreira could have stayed at Kaplan, rising through the ranks, but the dot-com era was dawning, and he became increasingly captivated by the power of technology to transform teaching and learning. He enrolled in Harvard Business School, but continued to play poker for fun and money, sometimes sleeping in his car at 4 a.m. in the parking lot of an Atlantic City casino, unwilling to spring for a hotel room despite the several thousand dollars in his pocket. MBA in hand, he went to work at Goldman Sachs, then left to found a mapping-software startup that imploded in the 2000 bust. He worked as a strategist for the John Kerry campaign for a while (he’s a nephew of Teresa Heinz Kerry). He was a venture capitalist.</p><p>“I was like, I’ve had these ideas about education germinating for a long time and I just got to the point where I said, I have to do this.” He started Knewton in 2008 with more or less the same vision he espouses today: to enable digital technology to transform learning for everyone and to build the company that dominates that transformation.</p><p>“Look at what other industries the Internet has transformed,” he told me at one of our first meetings, at a technology conference in 2009. “It laid waste to media and is rebuilding it—print, digital, video, music. Travel, hotels, restaurants, retail—anything with a big information component. But for whatever reason, people don’t see it with education. It is blindingly obvious to me that it will happen with education.</p><p>“All the content behind education is going to move online in the next 10 years. It’s one giant Oklahoma land grab—one tectonic shift. And that is what Knewton is going to power.”</p><p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz%20kidtech_1.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz%20kidtech_1.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz%20kidtech_1.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz%20kidtech_1.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz%20kidtech_1.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz%20kidtech_1.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz%20kidtech_1.jpg" alt="kamenetz kidtech" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
“The factory model of education is a gargantuan bureaucracy. Some kids are good fits—I wasn’t.” </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Mark Abramson </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>
<strong>THE RECOMMENDATION</strong> engine is a core technology of the Internet, and probably one you encounter every day. Google uses recommendations: other people who entered these search terms clicked on this page, so we’ll show it to you first. Amazon uses them: other people who bought this book also bought that book. Netflix uses them: you liked <i>Bringing Up Baby</i>, you’ll probably like <i>The Seven-Year Itch</i>.</p><p>The more you use one of these websites, the more it knows about you—not just about your current behavior, but about all the other searches and clicks you’ve done. In theory, as you spend more time with a site its recommendations will become more personalized even as they also draw on everyone else’s interactions within the platform.</p><p>Knewton, at base, is a recommendation engine but for learning. Rather than the set of all Web pages or all movies, the learning data set is, more or less, the universe of all facts. For example, a single piece of data in the engine might be the math fact that a Pythagorean triangle has sides in the ratio 3-4-5, and you can multiply those numbers by any whole number to get a new set of side lengths for this type of triangle. Another might be the function of “adversatives” such as “but,” “however,” or “on the other hand” in changing the meaning of an English sentence. Ferreira calls these facts “atomic concepts,” meaning that they’re indivisible into smaller concepts—he clearly also relishes the physics reference.</p><p>When a textbook publisher like Pearson loads its curriculum into Knewton’s platform, each piece of content—it could be a video, a test question, or a paragraph of text—is tagged with the appropriate concept or concepts.</p><p class="parallax">
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz%20kidtech_2.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz%20kidtech_2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz%20kidtech_2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz%20kidtech_2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz%20kidtech_2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz%20kidtech_2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz%20kidtech_2.jpg" alt="kamenetz kidtech" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
The majority of students placed into remedial math at community colleges never get their degrees. </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Brian Finke/Gallery Stock </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>Let’s say your school bought the Knewton-powered MyMathLab online system, using the specific curriculum based on, say, <i>Lial’s Basic College Mathematics 8e</i>. When a student logs on to the system, she first takes a simple placement test or pretest from the book, which has been tagged with the relevant “atomic concepts.” As a student reads the text or watches the video and answers the questions, Knewton’s system is “reading” the student as well—timing every second on task, tabulating every keystroke, and constructing a profile of learning style: hesitant or confident? Guessing blindly or taking her time? Based on the student’s answers, and what she did before getting the answer, “we can tell you to the percentile, for each concept: how fast they learned it, how well they know it, how long they’ll retain it, and how likely they are to learn other similar concepts that well,” says Ferreira. “I can tell you that to a degree that most people don’t think is possible. It sounds like space talk.” By watching as a student interacts with it, the platform extrapolates, for example, “If you learn concept No. 513 best in the morning between 8:20 and 9:35 with 80 percent text and 20 percent rich media and no more than 32 minutes at a time, well, then the odds are you’re going to learn every one of 12 highly correlated concepts best that same way.”</p><p>The platform forms a personalized study plan based on that information and decides what the student should work on next, feeding the student the appropriate new pieces of content and continuously checking the progress. A dashboard shows the student how many “mastery points” have been achieved and what to do next. Teachers, likewise, can see exactly which concepts the student is struggling with, and not only whether the homework problems have been done but also how many times each problem was attempted, how many hints were needed, and whether the student looked at the page or opened up the video with the relevant explanation.</p><p>The more people use the system, the better it gets; and the more you use it, the better it gets for you.</p><blockquote class="quote"><p></p><p>Global spending on education is in the trillions of dollars, and demand still far outstrips supply.</p>
</blockquote><p>In a traditional class, a teacher moves a group of students through a predetermined sequence of material at a single pace. Reactions are delayed—you don’t get homework or pop quizzes back for a day or two. Some students are bored; some are confused. You can miss a key idea, fall behind, and never catch up.</p><p>Software-enabled adaptive learning flips all of this on its head. Students can move at their own speed. They can get hints and instant feedback. Teachers, meanwhile, can spend class time targeting their help to individuals or small groups based on need.</p><p>Ferreira is able to work with competitors like Pearson and Wiley because his software can power anybody’s educational content, the same way Amazon Web Services provides the servers for any website to be hosted in the cloud. But before it had any content partners, as a proof of concept, Knewton built its own remedial college math course using its software platform. Math Readiness was adopted starting in the summer of 2011 at Arizona State University; the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; and the University of Alabama.</p><p>At ASU, students worked through the computer material in Knewton’s Math Readiness program on their own or in small groups, with instructors spending face-to-face time working on problem solving, critical thinking, and troubleshooting specific concepts. After two semesters of use, course withdrawal rates dropped by 56 percent and pass rates went from 64 percent to 75 percent. At Alabama, pass rates rose from 70 percent to 87 percent, and at UNLV, where entering students were given the chance to take the course online in the summer before they started college, the percentage who then qualified for college algebra went from 30 percent to 41 percent.</p><p>“Before this, I worked on the assumption that all students were at the same place. Now, because they progress at different rates, I meet them where they are,” Irene Bloom, a math lecturer at ASU, told an education blog about the pilot program. “I have so much more information about what my students do (or don’t do) outside of class. I can see where they are stuck, how fast they are progressing, and how much time and effort they are putting into learning mathematics.”</p><p>The Knewton system uses its analytics to keep students motivated. If it notices that you seem to have a confidence problem, because you too often blow questions that should be easy based on previous results, it will start you off with a few questions you’re likely to get right. If you’re stuck, choosing the wrong answer again and again, it will throw out broader and broader hints before just showing you the right answer. It knows when to drill you on multiplication and when to give you a fun animated video to watch.</p><blockquote class="quote"><p></p><p>There is a hunger for proof that students are achieving mastery, not just covering material.</p>
</blockquote><p>It turns out that personalizing in this way can speed up learning. In the first year, 45 percent of ASU students in a 14-week course learned the material four weeks ahead of schedule. “We’ve had students finish a semester course in 14 days,” says Ferreira, clearly psyched about setting free the kind of bored student he used to be. “For the whole history of the human race until now, she had to stay in that class the whole time.”</p><p>Better data is giving more options to the student who didn’t succeed as well. Students may not yet know enough to pass the final exam, but a close read of their answers shows that they are making slow and steady progress. “In the past, those students would have dropped out of school,” he says. In fact, the vast majority of students placed into remedial math at the nation’s community colleges never get their degrees. “Instead, we were able to say, give them another semester and they’ll get it. Their whole life has now changed.”</p><p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz-fe0325-kidtech-embed5.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz-fe0325-kidtech-embed5.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz-fe0325-kidtech-embed5.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz-fe0325-kidtech-embed5.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz-fe0325-kidtech-embed5.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz-fe0325-kidtech-embed5.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/07/10/kamenetz-fe0325-kidtech-embed5.jpg" alt="kamenetz-fe0325-kidtech-embed5" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
Microsoft founder Bill Gates (right) has done perhaps more than any single person to seed the growth of innovation in education. </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Amy E. Price/PRNewsFoto/AP </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>
<strong>GLOBAL SPENDING</strong> on education is in the trillions of dollars, and demand still far outstrips supply.</p><p>Ed-tech venture funding reached $1.1 billion in 2012. Rupert Murdoch has launched a $200 million tablet and digital curriculum brand; Apple and Google are building significant education businesses in devices and apps, respectively. Sebastian Thrun, Daphne Koller, and Andrew Ng, all Stanford professors, raised almost $100 million in venture capital to create online course platforms Udacity and Coursera, which deliver free video versions of courses created at the world’s most famous universities. The Khan Academy, a nonprofit library of free instructional videos and online exercises, has more than 6 million users per month and is used in 30,000 classrooms. Microsoft founder Bill Gates has perhaps done more than any single person to seed the growth of innovation in education, giving away hundreds of millions of dollars to both nonprofits and for-profits through the Gates Foundation’s education programs. At his keynote at SXSWedu, an entire subconference of the South by Southwest technology gathering in Austin, Texas, dedicated to ed-tech, he compared the digital revolution in education to the discovery of the polio vaccine. </p><p>These are early days, but the questions are mounting: Can all this innovation narrow the stubborn achievement gap between rich and poor or black and white? Can it lower the cost of college or make a dent in student-loan debt? And, as must be asked of all things tech, can it complement the human elements of education? Research indicates that emotional qualities like grit, persistence, and motivation may be even more important to students’ success than the knowledge or skills they acquire, and they all depend heavily on human relationships. Knowledge acquisition is the only aspect of education that today’s digital technology seems especially well adapted to. So far, most software applications, platforms, apps, and games, including Knewton’s, have been optimized for transferring quantitative, bounded bodies of facts in domains like math, science, or engineering, as well as basic literacy and grammar. An adaptive-learning platform like Knewton’s is helpless to tabulate or analyze a student’s insight in class discussions, the special brilliance of an essay, or creativity in a group presentation; anything that complex requires human discretion. </p><p>Still, within that subdomain of knowledge transfer, or what we’re used to thinking of as “learning,” interventions like Knewton’s are having intriguing results. As the Common Core attempts to raise standards, there is a hunger for proof that students are achieving mastery, not just covering material.</p><p>Knewton’s launch of a retail platform planned for early next year will allow anyone to upload any piece of educational content from the Web—whether a teacher’s own lesson, a TED talk, or a set of Khan Academy exercises. (Until now only textbook publishers could engage with the software.) The laborious process of tagging the content by “atomic concept” will be crowd sourced. If the community gets engaged, Knewton’s recommendation engine will be helping to sort the universe of free and open educational resources to provide much richer learning experiences to anyone, again, for free.</p><p>The idea of learning as an unmediated, infinitely scalable experience, as customized and seamless, given sufficient bandwidth, as downloading a song or watching a YouTube video, may turn out to be a fantasy of the early digital age—the era we’re in now. But the promise of putting all the intelligence of big data, rich content, and analytics in the hands of talented teachers and learners and setting them free, together, to explore at their own pace, in their own way—that is far more compelling, and achievable given what we’ve already seen. </p><p>In a rare moment of humility, Ferreira agrees. “In the end,” he says, “Knewton is just a tool.”</p>http://www.newsweek.com/2013/07/10/what-if-you-could-learn-everything-237660.htmlWed, 10 Jul 2013 04:45:00 -0400Author Joseph J. Ellis Pays Tribute to Edmund S. Morganhttp://www.newsweek.com/2013/07/10/author-joseph-j-ellis-pays-tribute-edmund-s-morgan-237680.html
<p>
<strong>EDMUND MORGAN</strong>, who died Monday, was my teacher at Yale from 1965 to 1969 and my mentor and role model in America history ever since. In our last conversation, he declared that he was ready to go, that he had outlived his beloved Benjamin Franklin and did not wish to outlive himself.</p><p>Ed was a rare breed, almost extinct these days, revered within the historical profession as the epitome of scholarly sophistication, while also the author of books that the general public found readable and seductive.</p><p>He was a small man, almost diminutive, but the famous description of James Madison also applied to Ed: “Never have I seen so much mind in so little matter.” A plausible case can be made that he was the most significant and influential American historian in the last half of the 20th century.</p><p>When he agreed to be the director of my doctoral dissertation, he took me into his office to deliver a sermon that I was probably not the first or last to hear: “When you construct a building, you put up scaffolding. But when the building is finished, you take the scaffolding down. Most academic history is all scaffolding and no building. We don’t do that.”</p><p>He was a tough editor who believed that the cogency of your argument was inseparable from the lucidity of your prose. His most frequent marginal comment, written with a fountain pen in black ink, was “What is the story?” He thought that too many history books were bloated reports on the authors’ research. In order to allow the story to drive the narrative, the most important decision was what to leave out.</p><p>The Morgan method was deceptively simple in theory but dramatically difficult in practice. You read the primary sources with your own eyes, then used your imagination to see patterns that had escaped your predecessors. There could be no Morgan school in this arrangement, since the eyes and imagination of each student determined the outcome. Ed did not want to produce disciples, only historians with their own compass.</p><p>I would like to believe that I am one of them.</p>http://www.newsweek.com/2013/07/10/author-joseph-j-ellis-pays-tribute-edmund-s-morgan-237680.htmlWed, 10 Jul 2013 04:45:00 -0400After Graduation, Practical Advice for Dreamershttp://www.newsweek.com/2013/06/12/after-graduation-practical-advice-dreamers-237548.html
<p>
<strong>AS MORTARBOARDS</strong> flew into the air at graduation ceremonies across the country over the past few days, students were left to ponder countless commencement speakers telling them to bravely seek a newer world, take risks, ignore naysayers, and generally emulate the ideal of the late Steve Jobs: “Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice,” Jobs told the graduating class at Stanford University in 2005. All very inspiring. But how does one translate that into an actionable plan? Steve Blank at the University of California, Berkeley, has blogged some solid advice that any student, and certainly any entrepreneur, should take to heart. Blank runs a program for startup founders called Lean LaunchPad, and he fully embraces the idea that creativity and craziness go together. But he asks three fundamental questions: Are you really passionate enough to sustain your belief in your project? Once you have heard all the negative evaluations, can you actually explain why you still want to persevere? (Hint, stubbornness is not enough.) Will it change the world enough to make it worth all the pain? In other words, to paraphrase an old Paul Simon song, will you be still crazy after all these tears? If the answer is yes, then go for it.</p>http://www.newsweek.com/2013/06/12/after-graduation-practical-advice-dreamers-237548.htmlWed, 12 Jun 2013 04:45:00 -0400Is ‘Deeper Learning’ Just a Bad Idea?http://www.newsweek.com/2013/06/05/deeper-learning-just-bad-idea-237502.html
<p>
<strong>SCHOOL’S OUT!</strong> It’s a time for students to rejoice—and for teachers to reflect. The educational fashion of the moment is called “deeper learning,” which, in very broad terms, is supposed to favor analytical skills over rote learning. It’s a concept introduced under many guises over the years, and a good one as far as it goes. But as Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution points out, deeper learning often goes too far: even first-grade math became baffling to parents when traditional methods of addition were forbidden. Citing earlier studies, Loveless writes that these “anti-knowledge movements,” by disparaging traditional academic content, often make social inequality worse: “If public schools don’t teach algebra or chemistry or great literature or how to write well—the old-fashioned learning that has been around for centuries and remains high-status knowledge in most cultures—rich kids will get it somewhere else. Poor kids won’t.” Or putting it another way, “It is difficult to think deeply about Shakespeare without actually having read his work, remembering it, and grasping at least a good part of what he was saying.” Of course, real teachers in the real world may not be so doctrinaire about deeper learning. We’ll know more in the fall.</p>http://www.newsweek.com/2013/06/05/deeper-learning-just-bad-idea-237502.htmlWed, 05 Jun 2013 04:45:00 -0400Why Suicide Has Become an Epidemic--and What We Can Do to Helphttp://www.newsweek.com/2013/05/22/why-suicide-has-become-epidemic-and-what-we-can-do-help-237434.html
<p><strong>WHEN THOMAS</strong> Joiner was 25 years old, his father—whose name was also Thomas Joiner and who could do anything—disappeared from the family’s home. At the time, Joiner was a graduate student at the University of Texas, studying clinical psychology. His focus was depression, and it was obvious to him that his father was depressed. Six weeks earlier, on a family trip to the Georgia coast, the gregarious 56-year-old—the kind of guy who was forever talking and laughing and bending people his way—was sullen and withdrawn, spending days in bed, not sick or hungover, not really sleeping.</p><p>Joiner knew enough not to worry. He knew that the desire for death—the easy way out, the only relief—was a symptom of depression, and although at least 2 percent of those diagnosed make suicide their final chart line, his father didn’t match the suicidal types he had learned about in school. He wasn’t weak or impulsive. He wasn’t a brittle person with bad genes and big problems. Suicide was understood to be for losers, basically, the exact opposite of men like Thomas Joiner Sr.—a successful businessman, a former Marine, tough even by Southern standards.</p><p class="parallax">
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/VanGogh_correct.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2013/05/22/VanGogh_correct.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/VanGogh_correct.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/VanGogh_correct.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/VanGogh_correct.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2013/05/22/VanGogh_correct.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/VanGogh_correct.jpg" alt="VanGogh_correct" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
What makes some people, such as Vincent van Gogh, desire death in the first place? </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Corbis </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>But Dad had left an unmade bed in a spare room, and an empty spot where his van usually went. By nightfall he hadn’t been heard from, and the following morning Joiner’s mother called him at school. The police had found the van. It was parked in an office lot about a mile from the house, the engine cold. Inside, in the back, the police found Joiner’s father dead, covered in blood. He had been stabbed through the heart.</p><p>The investigators found slash marks on his father’s wrists and a note on a yellow sticky pad by the driver’s seat. “Is this the answer?” it read, in his father’s shaky scrawl. They ruled it a suicide, death by “puncture wound,” an impossibly grisly way to go, which made it all the more difficult for Joiner to understand. This didn’t seem like the easy way out.</p><p>Back home for the funeral, Joiner’s pain and confusion were compounded by ancient taboos. For centuries suicide was considered an act against God, a violation of law, and a stain on the community. He overheard one relative advise another to call it a heart attack. His girlfriend fretted about his tainted DNA. Even some of his peers and professors—highly trained, doctoral-level clinicians—failed to offer a simple “my condolences.” It was as though the Joiner family had failed dear old Dad, killed him somehow, just as surely as if they had stabbed him themselves. To Joiner, however, the only real failing was from his field, which clearly had a shaky understanding of suicide.</p><p>Survivors of a suicide are haunted by the same whys and hows, the what-ifs that can never be answered. Joiner was no different. He wanted to know why people die at their own hands: What makes them desire death in the first place? When exactly do they decide to end their lives? How do they build up the nerve to do it? But unlike most other survivors of suicide, for the last two decades he has been developing answers.</p><p>Joiner is 47 now, and a chaired professor at Florida State University, in Tallahassee. Physically, he is an imposing figure, 6-foot-3 with a lantern jaw and a head shaved clean with a razor. He wears an off-and-on beard, which grows in as heavy as iron filings. The look fits his work, which is dedicated to interrogating suicide as hard as anyone ever has, to finally understand it as a matter of public good and personal duty. He hopes to honor his father, by combating what killed him and by making his death a stepping stone to better treatment. “Because,” as he says, “no one should have to die alone in a mess in a hotel bathroom, in the back of a van, or on a park bench, thinking incorrectly that the world will be better off.”</p><p>He is the author of the first comprehensive theory of suicide, an explanation, as he told me, “for all suicides at all times in all cultures across all conditions.” He also has much more than a theory: he has a moment. This spring, suicide news paraded down America’s front pages and social-media feeds, led by a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which called self-harm “an increasing public health concern.” Although the CDC revealed grabby figures—like the fact that there are more deaths by suicide than by road accident—the effort prompted only a tired spasm of talk about aging baby boomers and life in a recession. The CDC itself, in an editorial note, suggested that the party would rock on once the economy rebounded and our Dennis Hopper–cohort rode its hog into the sunset.</p><p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-suicide-embed2.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-suicide-embed2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-suicide-embed2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-suicide-embed2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-suicide-embed2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-suicide-embed2.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-suicide-embed2.jpg" alt="Dokoupil-fe0119-suicide-embed2" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
The world has lost many beloved public figures to suicide. Writer Virginia Woolf (d. March 28, 1941). </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Bettmann/Corbis </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-suicide-embed3.JPG.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-suicide-embed3.JPG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-suicide-embed3.JPG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-suicide-embed3.JPG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-suicide-embed3.JPG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-suicide-embed3.JPG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-suicide-embed3.JPG.jpg" alt="Dokoupil-fe0119-suicide-embed3.JPG" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
Writer David Foster Wallace (d. September 12, 2008). </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Gary Hannabarger/Corbis </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed4.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed4.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed4.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed4.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed4.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed4.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed4.jpg" alt="fe0119-suicide-embed4" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
Singer Mindy McCready (d. February 17, 2013). </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Frederick Breedon/WireImage/Corbis </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed5.JPG.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed5.JPG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed5.JPG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed5.JPG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed5.JPG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed5.JPG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed5.JPG.jpg" alt="fe0119-suicide-embed5.JPG" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
Artist Mark Rothko (d. February 25, 1970). </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Bettmann/Corbis </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>But suicide is not an economic problem or a generational tic. It’s not a secondary concern, a sideline that will solve itself with new jobs, less access to guns, or a more tolerant society, although all would be welcome. It’s a problem with a broad base and terrible momentum, a result of seismic changes in the way we live and a corresponding shift in the way we die—not only in America but around the world.</p><p>We know, thanks to a growing body of research on suicide and the conditions that accompany it, that more and more of us are living through a time of seamless black: a period of mounting clinical depression, blossoming thoughts of oblivion and an abiding wish to get there by the nonscenic route. Every year since 1999, more Americans have killed themselves than the year before, making suicide the nation’s greatest untamed cause of death. In much of the world, it’s among the only major threats to get significantly worse in this century than in the last.</p><p>The result is an accelerating paradox. Over the last five decades, millions of lives have been remade for the better. Yet within this brighter tomorrow, we suffer unprecedented despair. In a time defined by ever more social progress and astounding innovations, we have never been more burdened by sadness or more consumed by self-harm. And this may be only the beginning. If Joiner and others are right—and a landmark collection of studies suggests they are—we’ve reached the end of one order of human history and are at the beginning of a new order entirely, one beset by a whole lot of self-inflicted bloodshed, and a whole lot more to come.</p><p><strong>THE RISE</strong> of suicide in the U.S. has been slow enough to sneak up on people. I realized this just the other day, on the phone with Catherine Barber, who directs the Means Matter Campaign, a suicide-prevention program at Harvard. A decade ago, she led the team that designed the National Violent Death Reporting System, a key source of federal data on premature exits. Because she’s now focused on education and prevention, not data mining, it had been a few years since she looked at national numbers, so we logged on together.</p><p>We selected suicide from a drop-down menu of violent injuries that also included accidents, murder, and war, and we clicked send. Our screens blinked—hers in Boston, mine in New York—and up popped a simple black-and-white chart. The world’s most depressing spreadsheet. There are as many intentional ways to die as there are people to imagine them, and we saw more of all of them: an almost 20 percent rise in the annual suicide rate, a 30 percent jump in the sheer number of people who died, at least 400,000 casualties in a decade—about the same toll as World War II and Korea combined.</p><p>We saw more jumping and shooting, poisoning and stabbing, drowning, and strangulation. We even saw more death by “unspecified means,” a catch-all column for the most inventive forms of self-destruction—the swan dives into lava, the encounters with farm equipment. As she scrolled through the woe, Barber began to mutter to herself: “Oh, shoot ... yeah, that’s no good ... the increase is across all methods ... dang.”</p><p>This year, America is likely to reach a grim milestone: the 40,000th death by suicide, the highest annual total on record, and one reached years ahead of what would be expected by population growth alone. We blew past an even bigger milestone revealed in November, when a study lead by Ian Rockett, an epidemiologist at West Virginia University, showed that suicide had become the leading cause of “injury death” in America. As the CDC noted again this spring, suicide outpaces the rate of death on the road—and for that matter anywhere else people accidentally harm themselves. Somewhere Ralph Nader is smiling, but the takeaway is darkly profound: we’ve become our own greatest danger.</p><p>This development evades simple explanation. The shift in suicides began long before the recession, for example, and although the changes accelerated after 2007, when the unemployment rate began to rise, no more than a quarter of those new suicides have been tied to joblessness, according to researchers. Guns aren’t all to blame either, since the suicide rate has grown even as the portion of suicides by firearm has remained stable.</p><p>The fact is, self-harm has become a worldwide concern. This emerged in the new Global Burden of Disease report, published in <i>The Lancet</i> this past December. It’s the largest ever effort to document what ails, injures, and exterminates the species. But allow me to save you the reading. Humankind’s biggest health problem is humankind.</p><p>The coordinating center for the GBD, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, provided <i>Newsweek</i> with custom data that bears this out in dramatic fashion. At first glance, the numbers seem to be uniformly good news. The suicide rate—the number of people per 100,000 who killed themselves each year—dropped in developed countries between 1990 to 2010 and grew only slightly overall. But these age-adjusted good tidings mask considerable trauma in the population at large.</p><p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/11.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2013/05/22/11.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/11.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/11.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/11.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2013/05/22/11.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/11.jpg" alt="11" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
In the developed world, suicide became the leading cause of death in 2010 for people ages 15-49. </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Global Burden of Disease 2010 </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>Throughout the developed world, for example, self-harm is now the leading cause of death for people 15 to 49, surpassing all cancers and heart disease. That’s a dizzying change, a milestone that shows just how effective we are at fighting disease, and just how haunted we remain at the same time. Around the world, in 2010 self-harm took more lives than war, murder, and natural disasters combined, stealing more than 36 million years of healthy life across all ages. In more advanced countries, only three diseases on the planet do more harm.</p><p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed6.JPG.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed6.JPG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed6.JPG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed6.JPG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed6.JPG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed6.JPG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed6.JPG.jpg" alt="fe0119-suicide-embed6.JPG" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
Poet Anne Sexton (d. October 4, 1974). </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Bettmann/Corbis </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed7.JPG.JPG.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed7.JPG.JPG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed7.JPG.JPG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed7.JPG.JPG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed7.JPG.JPG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed7.JPG.JPG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed7.JPG.JPG.jpg" alt="fe0119-suicide-embed7.JPG.JPG" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
Designer Alexander McQueen (d. February 11, 2010). </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Richard Young/Rex USA </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed9.JPG.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed9.JPG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed9.JPG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed9.JPG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed9.JPG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed9.JPG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed9.JPG.jpg" alt="fe0119-suicide-embed9.JPG" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
Writer Sylvia Plath (d. February 11, 1963). </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>And this assumes we can even rely on the official data. Many researchers believe it’s a dramatic undercount, a function of fewer autopsies and more deaths by poison and pills, where intention is hard to detect. Ian Rockett of West Virginia University thinks the true rate is at least 30 percent higher, which would make suicide three times more common than murder. Last fall the World Health Organization estimated that “global rates” of suicide are up 60 percent since World War II. And none of this includes the pestilence of suicidal behavior, the thoughts and plans that slowly eat away at people, the corrosive social cost of 25 attempts for every one official death.</p><p>But perhaps the most concerning part of these developments, according to Harvey Whiteford, head of the GBD’s mental and behavioral health group, is that the changes behind them are likely to intensify amid the galloping progress of developing nations. Where people lack basic services, they live unsanitary, impoverished lives, and death comes to visit long before it’s invited. Where conditions improve, life expectancy does too, and somewhere in this transition there is a tipping point, a Rubicon beyond which death is no longer a bone-fingered stranger but the man in the mirror.</p><p>That’s scary in a world of constant (and welcome) improvement, but there’s an even bigger reason to fear the burden of suicide in the new millennium: it’s a charge being led by people in middle age. In America in the last decade, the suicide rate has declined among teens and people in their early 20s, and it’s also down or stable for the elderly. Almost the entire rise—as both the new CDC and GBD numbers show—is driven by changes in a single band of people, a demographic once living a happy life atop the human ziggurat: men and women 45 to 64, essentially baby boomers and their international peers in the developed world.</p><p>The suicide rate for Americans 45 to 64 has jumped more than 30 percent in the last decade, according to the new CDC report, and it’s possible to slice the data even more finely than they did. Among white, middle-aged men, the rate has jumped by more than 50 percent, according to a <i>Newsweek</i> analysis of the public data. If these guys were to create a breakaway territory, it would have the highest suicide rate in the world. In wealthy countries, suicide is the leading cause of death for men in their 40s, a top-five killer of men in their 50s, and the burden of suicide has increased by double digits in both groups since 1990.</p><p>The situation is even more dramatic for white, middle-aged women, who experienced a 60 percent rise in suicide in that same period, a shift accompanied by a comparable increase in emergency-room visits for drug-related (usually prescription-drug-related) attempts to die. In a sad twist, they often make a bid for death using the same medicine that was supposed to turn them back toward life. And the picture is equally grim for women in high-income countries, where self-harm trails only breast cancer as a killer of women in their early 40s—and has become the leading killer of women in their 30s. “In the middle of the journey of our life / I found myself in a dark wood,” begins Dante’s epic tour of hell. He wouldn’t have to change the line today.</p><blockquote class="quote"><p> </p><p> </p><p class="p1"><span class="s1">Baby boomers have the highest suicide rate right now, but everyone born after 1945 shows a higher rate than expected.</span></p><p> </p><p> </p></blockquote><p>In the United States, Julie Phillips, a sociologist at Rutgers University, was among the first researchers to frisk these middle-age suicides for deeper meaning. In 2010 she and a colleague declared the age range a new danger zone for self-harm. Many commentators took this as another fun fact about the boomers, not a cause for general alarm. But earlier this month, Phillips presented the results of a second paper, an attempt to settle the question of whether the boomers were especially suicidal. She sifted through eight decades of U.S. suicide data, wrenching it to separate the influence of absolute age, peer effects, and the events of the moment, and she found something shocking: the boomers have the highest suicide rate right now, but everyone born after 1945 shows a higher suicide risk than expected—and everyone is on pace for a higher rate than the boomers.</p><p>That means that the last decade isn’t just a statistical blip, a function of a bad recession, unlocked gun cases, or an aging counterculture. It’s much darker, and deeper than all that. This is the “new epidemiology of suicide,” as Phillips puts it, one where the tectonic changes of the last decade—socially, culturally, economically—have created a heavy burden of suicide, growing heavier by the year. “The baby-boomer generation,” Phillips writes in her new paper on boomers, “may be the tip of the iceberg.”</p><p class="parallax">
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/hemingway-parallax.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2013/05/22/hemingway-parallax.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/hemingway-parallax.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/hemingway-parallax.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/hemingway-parallax.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2013/05/22/hemingway-parallax.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/hemingway-parallax.jpg" alt="hemingway-parallax" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
Ernest Hemingway, whose father had also committed suicide (d. July 2, 1961). </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>When teen suicide was on the rise in the 1970s and 1980s, society was stung by the conclusion that something must be wrong with the way we live, because our children don’t want to join us. The question today is different, but just as unsettling. With people relinquishing life at its supposed peak, what does that say about the prize itself? What’s gone so rotten in the modern world? In her next bundle of research, Phillips hopes to pinpoint the massive, steam-rolling social change that matters most for self-harm. She has a good list of suspects: the astounding rise in people living alone, or else feeling alone; the rise in the number of people living in sickness and pain; the fact that church involvement no longer increases with age, while bankruptcy rates, health-care costs, and long-term unemployment certainly do.</p><p>Sociologists in general believe that when society robs people of self-control, individual dignity, or a connection to something larger than themselves, suicide rates rise. They are all descendants of Emile Durkheim, who helped found the field in the late-19th century, choosing to study suicide so he could prove that “social facts” explain even this “most personal act.” But when someone’s son dies by suicide and the family cries out for an answer, “social facts” don’t begin to assuage the pain or solve the mystery. When a government health official considers how he might slow down the suicide problem, “society” is a phantom he can’t fight without another kind of theory entirely.</p><p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/22.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2013/05/22/22.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/22.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/22.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/22.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2013/05/22/22.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/22.jpg" alt="22" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
In 2010 worldwide deaths from suicide outnumbered deaths from war (17,670), natural disasters (196,018), and murder (456,268). </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Global Burden of Disease 2010 </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p><strong>I MET </strong>Thomas Joiner in Tallahassee one sunny day in March, the kind of day that gives people hope and moves others to die. Spring is the start of suicide season, the time when the average daily death toll begins its climb to a mid-summer peak, before tapering through fall and winter. This is one of the strongest findings in the field, a 200-year debunking of Herman Melville’s damp, drizzly November of the soul. One respected 19th-century French researcher actually calculated a boiling point for suicidal desire. It’s 82 degrees, basically paradise.</p><p>But why? What is it about cherry blossoms that crowds the throat with sorrow? For years after his father’s death, Joiner amassed such odd facts about suicide, a bewildering catalog on a condition as old as society. For centuries there hadn’t been much to collect, and what there was, was often insulting. In the first half of the 20th century, suicide research got Freudian. Suicide was attributed to murderous rage turned inward, a death wish topped with a dollop of autoerotic desire. Was Thomas Joiner Sr. a man lost in a deadly spiral of masturbation and guilt? Somehow his son couldn’t see it.</p><p>By the time Joiner got his Ph.D. in 1993, the literature was full of facts about self-harm, but most were as perplexing as the notion of a spring suicide season. If four out of five suicide attempts are by women, why are four out of five suicides by men? If big cities and beautiful architecture are magnets for suicide, why are natural wonders and public parks as well? Prostitutes, athletes, and bulimics have an above-average risk for suicide, but what else do they have in common? Why are African-American people relatively safe? And twins?</p><p>Joiner had no idea when he took his first job at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. It was the first time since his father’s death that he got to regularly look suicidal people in the eye, only this time he did so knowingly, as a therapist, and with a decision to make: which of these people were risks to themselves? Under Texas law he was allowed to lock people up if they were, but space in the ward was tight, and he needed a way to sort the imminent threats from the not so imminent. He needed something that let him sleep at night. But how could he tell one from another?</p><p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed12.JPG.PG.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="624" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed12.JPG.PG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed12.JPG.PG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed12.JPG.PG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed12.JPG.PG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed12.JPG.PG.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="624" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/fe0119-suicide-embed12.JPG.PG.jpg" alt="fe0119-suicide-embed12.JPG.PG" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
Diane Arbus in 1968. She would kill herself four years later. </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Roz Kelly </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>The theories out there didn’t offer an answer. Neither did the lists of more than 100 known “risk factors,” which were too broadly defined, and most patients suffered from more than one: family conflict, combat experience, childhood abuse, poor sleep, drug and alcohol use, access to the means to die, witnessing suicide, previously attempting suicide, feeling alone, feeling angry, feeling purposeless—the list went on for pages. Single people, gay people, the newly widowed, the suddenly unemployed, the terminally ill, and the lonely were all found to be at an increased risk for suicide. But which of these factors could help differentiate people who want to live from those who want to die, and then again from those who ultimately do kill themselves? This was a huge hole in the field. On the journey from suicidal thought to metal gurney, 99.5 percent of people stray. What is it about the other 0.5 percent?</p><p>After hundreds of hours of sitting with patients, poring over research, and pounding his own memory, Joiner got a shoulder touch of inspiration: a seven-word explanation of everything. Why do people die by suicide? Because they want to. Because they can. Dozens of risk factors banged down to a formula he shared with me in his office: “People will die by suicide when they have both the desire to die and the ability to die.” When he broke down “the desire” and “the ability,” he found what he believes is the one true pathway to suicide.</p><p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/33.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2013/05/22/33.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/33.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/33.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/33.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2013/05/22/33.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/33.jpg" alt="33" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
Source: Kimberly A. Van Orden et al., "The Interpersonal Theory of Suicide," Psychol Rev. 117(2) (2010): 575 </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Kimberly A. Van Orden et al., "The Interpersonal Theory of Suicide," Psychol Rev. 117(2) (2010): 575 </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>It’s a “clearly delineated danger zone,” a set of three overlapping conditions that combine to create a dark alley of the soul. The conditions are tightly defined, and they overlap rarely enough to explain the relatively rare act of suicide. But what’s alarming is that each condition itself isn’t extreme or unusual, and the combined suicidal state of mind is not unfathomably psychotic. On the contrary, suicide’s Venn diagram is composed of circles we all routinely step in, or near, never realizing we are in the deadly center until it’s too late. Joiner’s conditions of suicide are the conditions of everyday life.</p><p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-Suicide-embed13.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-Suicide-embed13.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-Suicide-embed13.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-Suicide-embed13.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-Suicide-embed13.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-Suicide-embed13.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-Suicide-embed13.jpg" alt="Dokoupil-fe0119-Suicide-embed13" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
Male Australian redbacks sacrifice their lives for sex. The females often devour the males after they mate. But there’s an evolutionary upside: a greater chance the male passes along his genes. </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Patrick Honan/Steve Parish Publishing/Corbis </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>He calls the first “low belonging,” and it’s the most intuitive idea in his formula. Joiner argues that “the desire to die” begins with loneliness, a thwarted need for inclusion and connection. That explains why suicide rates rise by a third on the continuum from married to never been married. It also accords with the fact that divorced people suffer the greatest suicide risk, while twins have reduced risk and mothers of small children have close to the lowest risk. A mother of six has six times the protection of her childless counterpart, according to one study. She may die of work and worry, but not of self-harm.</p><p>The need to belong is so strong, Joiner says, that it sometimes expresses itself even in death. “I’m walking to the bridge,” begins a Golden Gate Bridge suicide note he cites. “If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump.” The writer jumped. He was alone, and so are more of the rest of us. Unattached is the new fancy-free, a strategy for success that translates to later marriages, easier divorces, fewer kids, and a tendency to keep running toward the next horizon, skipping family dinner in the process.</p><p>Twelve years and a tech revolution after Robert Putnam wrote <i>Bowling Alone</i>, his treatise on the decline in American community, the institutions that used to bind America together have, if anything, crumbled even further. People tell surveyors that the world has become less helpful, trustworthy, and fair. It’s a place where you work longer at more deadening jobs for less pay, your life pulsing away with each new email, or worse, each additional hour on your feet. What’s deadly about all this is the loss of what Joiner calls “reciprocal care.” When people have no shoulder to lean on, they feel more isolated, and that isolation can be lethal.</p><p>Maybe Facebook is not “making us lonely,” as Stephen Marche argued in an Atlantic cover story last spring. But Facebook doesn’t help. “The greater the proportion of online interactions, the lonelier you are,” John Cacioppo, a professor at the University of Chicago and the world’s foremost expert on loneliness, told Marche. The opposite is also true: more face time, less loneliness. But as you might expect, the trend lines in our relationships are all in one direction.</p><blockquote class="quote"><p> </p><p> </p><p class="p1"><span class="s1">The life-saving power of </span><span class="s2">belonging may explain </span><span class="s1">why, in America, Hispanics and African-Americans have lower suicide rates than whites.</span></p><p> </p><p> </p></blockquote><p>For her 2011 book, <i>Alone Together</i>, MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle interviewed more than 450 people, most of them in their teens and 20s, about their lives online. She’s the author of two prior tech-positive books, but this time she discovered a sadder, more antiseptic world, a place where people turn to their machines more than each other. She even identified a long-term trend toward sex with robots, a future where we’ll prefer mechanical company over the mess of human interaction. (And here you thought it was hard enough to live up to our current crop of battery-powered lovers: the flicker of Internet porn, the hum of a bedside power tool). After a decade of decline in face-to-face gatherings, Mark Silva, CEO of Great Unions, one of the nation’s largest reunion-planning companies, launched a new marketing pitch: “Unplug for a night.” He might now be justified to add: “Or else.”</p><p>The life-saving power of belonging may help explain why, in America, blacks and Hispanics have long had much lower suicide rates than white people. They are more likely to be lashed together by poverty, and more enduringly tied by the bonds of faith and family. In the last decade, as suicide rates have surged among middle-aged whites, the risk for blacks and Hispanics of the same age has increased less than a point—although they suffer worse health by almost every other measure. There’s an old joke in the black community, a nod to the curious powers of poverty and oppression to keep suicide rates low. It’s simple, really: you can’t die by jumping from a basement window.</p><p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-Suicide-embed15.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-Suicide-embed15.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-Suicide-embed15.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-Suicide-embed15.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-Suicide-embed15.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-Suicide-embed15.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-Suicide-embed15.jpg" alt="Dokoupil-fe0119-Suicide-embed15" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
Lions: Adult males will charge into a battle against another lion pride, even if outnumbered, and expose their throats to attacking lions to give family members a chance to escape. </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Mitsuaki Iwago/Minden Pictures/Getty </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>Joiner calls his second condition “burdensomeness,” and it may be as emotionally intuitive as loneliness. When people see themselves as effective—as providers for their families, resources for their friends, contributors to the world—they maintain the will to live. When they lose that view of themselves, when it curdles into a feeling of liability, the desire to die takes root. We need each other, but if we feel we are failing those we need, the choice is clear. We’d rather be dead.</p><p>This explains why suicides rise with unemployment, and also with the number of days a person has been on bed rest. Just the experience of needing and receiving help from friends—rather than doing for oneself and others—can make a person pine for death. We’re a gregarious species, but also a gallant one, so fond of playing the savior that we’d rather die than switch roles with the saved. In this way suicide isn’t the ultimate act of selfishness or a bid for revenge, two of the more common cultural barbs. It’s closer to mistaken heroism.</p><p>If suicide has an evolutionary component, as Joiner believes it might, this is where it manifests itself. Humans are not the only animals that commit suicide. Bumblebees kill themselves as a defense against parasites, abandoning the nest to save it. Pea aphids do something similar. They use a kind of suicide bomb that maims ladybugs, their biggest predator, to save their own kind. Higher up in the animal kingdom, male lions sacrifice themselves on the savannas: they expose their throats to attacking clans in an effort to give other family members a chance to escape. A similar instinct may still linger in our DNA, colliding uncomfortably with the frailties and banalities of modern life.</p><p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe01198-Suicide-Bumblebee2%20.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe01198-Suicide-Bumblebee2%20.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe01198-Suicide-Bumblebee2%20.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe01198-Suicide-Bumblebee2%20.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe01198-Suicide-Bumblebee2%20.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe01198-Suicide-Bumblebee2%20.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe01198-Suicide-Bumblebee2%20.jpg" alt="Dokoupil-fe01198-Suicide-Bumblebee2 " title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
Honeybees: In what is literally sex to-die for, male honeybees perish after mating. Bumblebees, a close relative, will also abandon their nest if infested with a parasite. </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Robert Pickett/Visuals Unlimited Inc./Getty </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>Has there ever been a society that does more than our own to make people feel like ineffective animals? Whole neighborhoods are caught in federal catch nets, incarcerated or snared in a cycle of government benefits. Millions more are poor or near poor, most likely stuck that way. And never have Americans been heavier, or sicker. One in five people in middle age suffers multiple chronic diseases, double the rate of a decade earlier. If Joiner is right, all these developments are as hard on the mind as on the body. As one of the suicide notes Joiner quotes puts it: “Survival of the fittest. Adios. Unfit.”</p><p>The recession can’t explain the new trends in suicide, but longer-term structural changes in the economy may undergird many of them. Only recently have economists begun to focus on the psychological impact of income inequality, tying the wealth and happiness of all to the risk of suicide for some. If you make 10 percent less than your neighbor, for example, you are 4.5 percent more likely to die by suicide, according to a paper led by Mary C. Daly, who works for the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco. In an earlier study, she and colleagues found that suicide rates generally rise with measures of national “happiness,” a fact that accords nicely with Joiner’s ideas about alienation and burdensomeness. It’s hard to be sad and alone, and even harder if others seem too happy to disturb.</p><p>If Joiner is right about the suicidal peril of feeling useless, then long-term changes in the economy can also help explain the new demographics of suicide. As the U.S. workforce has transitioned from brawn to brain over the past three decades, women have matched or overtaken men as a percentage of all job holders. In doing so, however, they seem to acquire some of the traditional male risk for suicide when their performance in those roles falters. That could be why the suicide shift is stark among middle-aged educated women, according to forthcoming research by Hyeyoung Woo, a sociologist at Portland State University. They are the rare group where more school is associated with more opportunity—but also more self-harm.</p><p>Among their middle-aged male counterparts, the opposite is true: those with less education have a greater suicide risk. The states with the highest suicide rates tend to be clustered in the South and the Mountain West, areas with a lot of white men and guns, a historically bad combination for self-harm. This suicide belt is also defined by what psychologists have dubbed a “culture of honor.” As Joiner has discovered, that means higher murder rates but even more-exaggerated suicide rates, a fact he attributes to millennia of old masculine codes meeting a disappearance of blue-collar jobs unlikely to reverse itself. Give me honor, or give me death was a safer personal motto when honor could still be readily found.</p><p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-Suicide-embed17.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed"><!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]--><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-Suicide-embed17.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-Suicide-embed17.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-Suicide-embed17.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-Suicide-embed17.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)"></source><source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-Suicide-embed17.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)"></source><!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]--><img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/05/22/Dokoupil-fe0119-Suicide-embed17.jpg" alt="Dokoupil-fe0119-Suicide-embed17" title="" /></picture><span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
Aphids: Aphids past the age of reproduction release a waxy substance on predatory ladybugs approaching their habitats, harming the ladybugs and killing themselves in the process. </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Herbert Kehrer/Corbis </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>Even people in their teens and earlier 20s may discover the lethal effects of unemployment. Krysia Mossakowski, a sociologist at the University of Hawaii, has found that people unemployed for long stretches during their young years are far more likely to show signs of depression and alcoholism as they approach middle age. This finding held regardless of psychological history, and it was unshakable even among those young people who went on to flourish in the workforce. In Japan, meanwhile, most mental-health-related disability claims are filed by people who entered the labor force during the economically “lost decade” of the 1990s. They’re in their 30s now, and increasingly depressed.</p><p>But then again so is everyone. The trends in suicide in both America and abroad are mirrored by devastating changes in behavior and mental health. In the last two decades, for example, there’s been a 37 percent increase in the years of life lost to clinical depression, anxiety, alcohol and drug abuse, and other disorders of the mind, according to the batch of previously unpublished GBD data provided to Newsweek. As a group, these disorders are the leading cause of disability in the world, vexing developing countries in particular, and the United States most of all. In the land that commercialized positive thinking and put pill bottles in every drawer, depression has emerged as the most debilitating condition we face.</p><p>Joiner calls his final condition for suicide “fearlessness,” and all that really means is “the ability to die,” an ability he says people have to develop over time. That’s because it’s hard to kill yourself. This should be obvious. The human body is built to endure, the mind rigged to flee from death, which is why so many people flinch. They apply the brakes, pull up at the railing, beg someone to pump their stomach, lever themselves off the tracks, or just pass out before they can inflict the damage they intend.</p><blockquote class="quote"><p> </p><p> </p><p class="p1"><span class="s1">Athletes, doctors, prostitutes, and bulimics all share a heightened risk of suicide. All have a history of tamping down the instinct to scream. </span></p><p> </p><p> </p></blockquote><p>In this way, suicide isn’t about cowardice. It’s not painless or easy, like pulling the fire alarm to get out of math class. It takes “a kind of courage,” says Joiner, “a fearless endurance” that’s not laudable, but certainly not weak or impulsive. On the contrary, he says, suicide takes a slow habituation to pain, a numbness to violence. He points to that heightened suicide risk shared by athletes, doctors, prostitutes, and bulimics, among others—anybody with a history of tamping down the body’s instinct to scream, which goes a long way to unlocking the riddle of military suicides.</p><p>For the population at large, it might seem mildly reassuring at first. After all, most of us don’t fall into these categories. But Joiner believes there may be a side door to fearlessness: exposure to violence in media. Remember this debate? Well, it’s basically over. “The strength of the association between media violence and aggressive behavior,” the American Academy of Pediatrics concluded in 2009, “is greater than the association between calcium intake and bone mass, lead ingestion and lower IQ, and condom nonuse and sexually acquired HIV infection, and is nearly as strong as the association between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.” In one of the studies reviewed, a social psychologist showed students pictures of a man shoving a gun down another man’s throat, among other images. The people who had been exposed to more violent media didn’t respond. They were numb.</p><p>Joiner first sketched his theory about a decade ago, which isn’t all that different from yesterday in the science world, a place where evolution is still just a theory. But his ideas have already survived direct challenges, and he has defended them before ballrooms of academics and long tables lined with government officials. The Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations have forked over cash, as have the National Institutes of Health and the Pentagon, which recently tapped him to co-direct its Military Suicide Research Consortium. In two books—<i>Why People Die by Suicide</i> (2005) and <i>Myths About Suicide</i> (2010), both published by Harvard University Press—and hundreds of articles, he has built a testable model. It’s “elegant” in the words of Aaron Beck, a University of Pennsylvania psychiatrist, known as the father of cognitive therapy. It’s “insightful” and “effective,” added the American Psychological Association, which published a $60 volume of Joiner’s work to help guide clinicians suffering their own Galveston crossroads.</p><p>As we discussed suicide in his office, the Florida sun blazing through a picture window, Joiner gently bounced side to side in a swivel chair. He wore blue jeans and a short-sleeve button-down in the buff color of a cartoon desert. He spoke in careful, complete sentences. But it was hard to concentrate once I noticed the trophy-size silver fish and coiled snake mounted near his computer. “That’s a piranha,” he explained, “and that’s a rattlesnake.” He keeps both as reminders of this principle that killing your own kind, let alone yourself, is hard to do. “The piranha won’t do it. They’ll kill us, but they won’t kill each other,” he says. “Same with rattlesnakes. They have venom and fangs and everything, but they don’t use those. They wrestle. It’s a rule of nature, not a hard fact, but a rule of thumb: you don’t kill your own.”</p><div class="vimeo"><iframe frameborder="0" height="281" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/66470214" width="500"></iframe></div><p>And yet his father did. He grew lonely, letting old friendships die as he built his career. He formed an identity through work, one that left him rudderless when he entered semi-retirement. Here was his sense of not belonging, a feeling so acute he tried to join an African-American church, apparently lured by the community and the possibility of connection. The sense of burdensomeness came later, as his dark moods prevented him from being the pillar he had been within his family. That gave rise to the desire to die, according to Joiner’s theory.</p><p>But the <i>ability</i> to die took root earlier and grew much more slowly. Joiner’s father had a lifetime of painful physical experiences—freak accidents, sporting injuries. He was also a fisherman, a man who knew how to use a knife and was comfortable with blood on his hands. Joiner recalls one fishing trip in particular, father and son unzipping the sea in a boat that felt like a 25-foot piece of driftwood in the heaving Atlantic. When a sudden storm developed, Joiner watched his father wrestle the waves, trying to keep the tiny yacht from capsizing. He gripped the wheel until it snapped off, at which point he steered using all that remained, a shattered column, his hands slashed and bleeding.</p><p>This, in the end, is what killed him, Joiner says: the fact that his father was strong enough, in a perverted way, to fall on his own knife. This, and the fact that he found himself in the center of the three circles of risk. After decades of walking in and out of them, much as we all do, he walked into the middle.</p><p>These days, Joiner’s thoughts have shifted toward prevention. If he’s right about suicide, the ability to foil one of the three variables is the ability to save a life. Smart clinicians can do it, but it’s not easy to get people into treatment. There’s the cost, for one thing, but more than that, there’s the shame and the stigma. Suicide is the rare killer that fails to inspire celebrity PSAs, 5K fun runs, and shiny new university centers for study and treatment. That has to change, says Joiner. “We need to get it in our heads that suicide is not easy, painless, cowardly, selfish, vengeful, self-masterful, or rash,” he says. “And once we get all that in our heads at last, we need to let it lead our hearts.”</p><p><strong>Need help? In the U.S. call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.</strong></p>http://www.newsweek.com/2013/05/22/why-suicide-has-become-epidemic-and-what-we-can-do-help-237434.htmlThu, 23 May 2013 04:45:00 -0400Should Top U.S. Colleges Expand Overseas?http://www.newsweek.com/should-top-us-colleges-expand-overseas-62847
<p>Sometime next week, New York University’s president, John Sexton, will face a no-confidence vote by his faculty. The affable Sexton has led an ambitious expansion campaign during his 11 years at the helm of the most expensive university in the country, unveiling a “NYU 2031” plan to build 2.8 million square feet of new construction in its home base of Greenwich Village, and&nbsp;operating the “Global Network University” with a new campus in Abu Dhabi, one under construction in Shanghai, and 12 other sites.<br>
</p>
<p>Students and faculty are crying foul, saying this plan represents the utmost in hubris, an imperial grab for cash and glory at the expense of liberal values, academic integrity, and educational quality. And NYU is not alone. Some of our nation’s most prestigious private universities are reaching miles beyond the traditional study-abroad program, building entire branch campuses around the world. And as they do, students and faculty associated with those schools are asking a key question: can an ivory-tower education really be exported around the world like McDonald’s or Hollywood, without destroying the original mission?</p><p>The new educational sites are often located in the Middle East and East Asia, where governments offer generous funding to import a bit of American prestige. The arrangements—millions of dollars in direct foreign investment plus more in tuition—represent a desperately needed infusion of cash to American colleges, which have been cranking up tuition two or three times faster than inflation for three decades while still failing to keep up with their rising costs. Most of these foreign programs charge students similar tuition as the mother schools do back at home, while controlling costs with fewer educational offerings and lower overhead.</p><p>This may explain why questions about quality control don’t seem to be slowing the expansion. Right now there are 200 international branch campuses, a 23 percent increase from just three years ago. Within the next two years, a total of 37 more such branches are expected to open, stamping some of the most highly selective brands in American academia over a wider-than-ever range of classrooms, settings, and countries.</p><p>NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) is in its third year of classes, offering 22 undergraduate majors, and NYU Shanghai is under construction. A single, 2,500-acre complex, Education City in Doha, Qatar, funded with billions from the oil-rich monarchy, hosts mini-branches of Weill Cornell Medical College, Georgetown, Northwestern, Texas A&amp;M, Carnegie Mellon, and several more universities. Duke University is building a campus in Kunshan, China, and Yale University is cofounding Yale-NUS College, positioned as “an autonomous liberal-arts college” (rather than a branch campus) with the National University of Singapore. (Singapore’s national university has also had joint ventures with Duke, NYU, and Johns Hopkins.) The Emirates, with 39, hosts more foreign university branches than any other country.</p><p>The leaders of this growing trend argue that any world-class university in the 21st century requires a global footprint to fulfill its historic mission. “Over millennia, thinkers from Confucius to Socrates to Ibn al’Arabi to Petrarch to Kant have invoked cosmopolitanism as fundamental to society—even more so in a global society,” wrote NYU’s Sexton in his 18,000-word “reflection” on his expansion plan, prepared as part of a 2010 international barnstorming tour. “A global network university is designed to accommodate, nurture and incarnate particularly well the interdependent nature of the emerging global society.” Surveys show that students abroad are satisfied with their experiences as well.</p><p>But for nearly every university branching out overseas, there are faculty and students raising alarms—on discrimination, educational quality, civil liberties, academic freedom, financial motivations, and the political implications of trying to establish such a core democratic institution on nondemocratic soil.</p><p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/03/04/1362116293145.cached.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="640" class="mapping-embed">
<!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]-->
<source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2013/03/04/1362116293145.cached.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)" />
<source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/03/04/1362116293145.cached.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)" />
<source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/03/04/1362116293145.cached.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)" />
<source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/03/04/1362116293145.cached.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)" />
<source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2013/03/04/1362116293145.cached.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)" />
<!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]-->
<img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="640" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/03/04/1362116293145.cached.jpg" alt="kamenetz-fe0309-universities-embed1" title="" />
</picture> <span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
NYU president John Sexton has expanded his school across the globe, but his efforts have brought him trouble. </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg, via Getty Images </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>To start with, overseas school offerings don’t match the level of any elite university institution in the United States. A review of websites and course listings, and interviews with faculty members who have taught overseas, reveal that courses, majors, and degree programs tend to be limited—usually focusing on the biggest economic draws: business, science, and technology. “In its first five years, the scale will be more like a college than a university,” admits Mary Bullock, executive vice chancellor of Duke in Kunshan, which will initially grant degrees only in management studies and global health. Similarly, Yale-NUS College, which is launching with just 150 students, is introducing a required Common Curriculum that is much narrower than the wide-ranging distribution requirements and thousands of options back in New Haven.</p><p>Faculty quality is also a problem. While these schools showcase marquee professor talent, such well-paid teachers are more likely to fly in for short “intensive” courses of just a few weeks, while the bulk of the teaching is done by lower-paid adjuncts and graduate students. For example, at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar in 2009, of 38 faculty members, only three were tenure-track from the main campus, while the rest were contract workers. “These are not necessarily inferior teachers, but they’re paid on a completely different scale and they don’t have job security,” says Christopher Newfield, an American Studies professor at University of California, Santa Barbara, who is conducting research on the economic and political factors driving the growth of international branch campuses. (His research is focused in part on how the ambition to grow overseas affects the original mission of American universities to promote social mobility here at home.) “From the student point of view they don’t have the same investment in the student learning experience that full-time people have.” In an article published in a scholarly journal, Purdue professor Richard Rupp wrote that he had interviewed many adjuncts in Education City who had little more than the equivalent of a U.S. master’s degree, had been asked to teach courses outside their field, and had little commitment to the institutions, which offered them the hope of only short-term employment.</p><p>The quality of the students, an integral part of the experience at selective institutions, is an even sketchier matter. Education systems in the developing world are better known for rote drilling and turning out hard workers in technical fields than for fostering individual thought and creative expression, and every professor I talked with who had taught overseas said that encouraging students from around the world to speak up in seminars was sometimes a challenge. According to Rupp, many students on Middle Eastern branch campuses are not prepared to participate in English, forcing every course to incorporate English instruction. More troublingly, there are widespread reports of Chinese students using “consultants” to falsify transcripts, test scores, and essays in order to be admitted to stateside institutions, which raises the question of whether they’d do the same to get into Chinese branch campuses.</p><p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/03/04/1362116291159.cached.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="640" class="mapping-embed">
<!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]-->
<source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2013/03/04/1362116291159.cached.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)" />
<source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/03/04/1362116291159.cached.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)" />
<source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/03/04/1362116291159.cached.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)" />
<source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2013/03/04/1362116291159.cached.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)" />
<source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2013/03/04/1362116291159.cached.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)" />
<!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]-->
<img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="640" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2013/03/04/1362116291159.cached.jpg" alt="kamenetz-fe0309-universities-embed2" title="" />
</picture> <span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
The Hopkins-Nanjing Center, in China, is run jointly by a U.S. and Chinese school. </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Qilai Shen/Bloomberg, via Getty </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>NYUAD trumpets its 2 percent acceptance rate and high SAT scores. But a professor I spoke with at Carnegie Mellon Qatar presented a different picture. “The students, let me see, how to phrase that,” he said, hesitating. “Some are outstanding, a pleasure to work with. Others are less outstanding.” Given the limited number of applications that the overseas campus receives, he said, it’s impossible to recruit the same caliber of students that are found in the U.S.</p><p>While the number of prospective students is part of the problem, cultural preferences also play a role. When liberal-arts courses are offered on these foreign campuses, for instance, interest is low. “NYU Abu Dhabi was founded on the premise of providing a real humanistic liberal-arts education—different from what goes on at the Emirati universities,” says Linda Gordon, an NYU historian who taught at the Abu Dhabi campus in 2011 and published an article in Dissent magazine critical of the expansion. “But I know from colleagues that in the last year, there’s been very low enrollments in liberal-arts courses beyond those that are required. The overwhelming number of students want to study science or technology.” (NYU's Abu Dhabi campus has provided information indicating that to date, 64 percent of students at that school who have declared majors have declared one in the arts, humanities, or social sciences.)<br>
</p>
<p>For American students and alumni of elite institutions, the danger is that the value of their degrees will be watered down by the presence of a lower-quality foreign-made degree under the same name. There’s also a more direct concern: that the resources spent on expansion impoverishes the experiences of students on the main campus. Chris Miller, who teaches African-American Studies and French, and is a faculty leader of the opposition to Yale-NUS College, objects to the creation of 21 “visiting faculty” posts for Singapore. “This is a brain drain. It is something that Yale New Haven students should be concerned about,” he said. “Your professor is headed for Singapore for a year! Good luck working with him/her on your senior essay/dissertation/oral exams/etc.!”</p><p>“Are we stripping resources from this campus by sending people to China?” says Paul Haagen, a law professor at Duke appointed by the faculty senate to provide input on the school’s several Chinese expansion projects. (The Kunshan project has been delayed five separate times due to problems with funding and construction.) “Is this a distraction? When the administration falls in love with an idea like this—what aren’t they doing? What else could they be doing that would be more effective? These are just some of the unknowns.”</p><p>Hand in hand with the quality-control issues are concerns about free speech on campuses opening in nations with checkered human-rights and civil-liberties practices. Typically, branches have agreements with the host governments allowing for a wider freedom of political speech within the classroom than that permitted for ordinary citizens on the street. But that protection ends at the border of the campus.</p><p>Jessica Dickinson Goodman, originally from the Bay Area, studied at Carnegie Mellon Qatar in Education City. She served as a student ambassador to orient new arrivals to campus, reveled in the small classes and lots of contact with professors, and was involved in musical theater and sports. Although an outspoken feminist, she insists she had no trouble with wearing long sleeves, even in the stifling heat, as a sign of respect. Still, she acknowledges that free debate is somewhat curtailed by the school’s location. “It feels like a U.S. university in everything from freedom of speech to academic freedom, but once you step off campus, it’s straight-up illegal to criticize the government ... [Y]ou have to be tactful. You can’t just say whatever you think.” Among her friends, she said, the only one “who would be completely unable to enjoy CMU Qatar was a friend who loved shorts and didn’t want to wear pants.” And, more ominously, she adds, “Friends who had no ability to hold their tongue wouldn’t have a lot of fun there either.”</p><p>Qatar, the Emirates, China, and Singapore have all been sanctioned by Amnesty International and other human-rights groups for repression of political dissent and discrimination against women and sexual minorities. Often pro-democratic student groups are targeted. In July 2012, Pericles Lewis, former dean of literature at Yale and new president of Yale-NUS College, announced that students at the new Singapore campus would not be allowed to organize political protests or form political-party student groups—on or off campus—in accordance with local laws. Then-president Richard Levin said that students would be expected to obey local law just as they do in Connecticut or while studying abroad in London. “Yale is betraying the spirit of the university as a center of open debate and protest by giving away the rights of its students at its new Singapore campus,” Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “Instead of defending these rights, Yale buckled when faced with Singapore’s draconian laws.”</p><p>As an openly gay professor at Yale, Chris Miller is especially concerned with Singapore’s anti-sodomy laws, enforced with arrests and imprisonment in recent years. “These ventures are taking American academia into an undemocratic society,” he says.</p><p>The American adventure in overseas universities is barely embarked on, but a convergence of political and economic factors is already causing serious blowback.</p><p>Critics see “a desperate scramble for cash abroad,” in the words of Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media, culture, and communication at NYU’s Steinhardt School who is a leader of the opposition to NYU’s expansion plans both overseas and at home in Greenwich Village. Newfield, the American Studies scholar, puts the overseas adventures in the context of several decades of declining public and private subsidies for higher education. “They’ve run out of money in the U.S. Research money is flat, endowments are flat or falling, students and family aren’t willing to keep paying more and more. So the question becomes, where is the university going to get more money?”</p><p>Financial arrangements vary greatly from host country to host country. The Emirates’ deal with NYU, beginning with an initial $50 million donation to the home campus from the principalities, is one of the most generous among all branch campuses. The state offers scholarships up to $65,000 for nearly every student, with no loans, including room, board, spending money, and travel home. There are research stipends for professors who agree to teach there. The emirs are building a brand-new campus for NYUAD, set to open in 2014, 1,600 feet off the coast of Abu Dhabi on Saadiyat Island, an ultraluxury residential and commercial development that will also feature branches of the Guggenheim and Louvre museums. Besides these investments and operating expenses, an undisclosed percentage of funds travels directly from NYU Abu Dhabi back to New York. Shanghai’s government is also paying for the NYU campus in that city, and funding research for faculty back in New York. (The story in Qatar is similar: Education City will be a $33 billion project 20 years in the making when it is completed in 2016—and that’s the bill for architecture and construction alone, not counting scholarships, financial aid, and other subsidies.)</p><p>“The Global Network University is all about getting as much cash up front as possible,” says NYU’s Miller. “The money that they charge goes directly back to the central administration.” “Sexton is brilliant at finding other people’s money,” Newfield adds. “The operation can run much higher profit margins in Abu Dhabi than it could ever run in New York.”</p><p>The longer-term question that worries critics is what happens when host countries overseas stop supporting—for a variety of financial or ideological reasons—American universities abroad. In the wake of the Arab Spring, Abu Dhabi has shuttered several foreign research institutions and think tanks because of fears of the influence of democratization. “It raises the question of what would happen if or when the crown prince changes his mind” in Abu Dhabi, says Gordon of NYU. “It isn’t a self-sustaining operation.”</p><p>In Singapore, meanwhile, several universities have already found continuing their operations to be unsustainable after the initial government incentives ended. There simply was not enough interest from local students in paying American prices to study in Asia. University of New South Wales, Johns Hopkins University, University of Las Vegas, and, most recently, New York University’s own Tisch School of the Arts film program have announced that they will suspend operations in the country—leading to rancorous protests from American students overseas.</p><p>NYU’s overseas expansion plans face the most organized outcry. The upcoming faculty of arts and sciences vote against Sexton is set to be repeated across several schools of the university during the spring and summer. “We’re opposed to the idea of setting up a branch in Abu Dhabi because it’s a police state,” says NYU’s Miller, one of the most vocal leaders of the opposition. “You’re not allowed to bring a camera out into the streets. The legal code discriminates against Jews and gay people. What is NYU doing in a place like that?”</p><p>Seyla Benhabib, a Yale political science and philosophy professor, is just as blunt about Yale-NUS College. “The more we looked into Singapore’s human-rights record, the more terrified we got,” she says. “Those of us who criticize, we’re not anti-globalist or anti-cosmopolitan. I myself went to an American college in Istanbul. The question is, why should we open a liberal-arts college in a boutique police state? I still have not heard a convincing argument.”</p><p>For champions of access to affordable, quality higher education—a need that another 150 million students around the globe will face in this decade—the ultimate concern is how building high-priced programs for small numbers of affluent students overseas detracts from, or at least distracts from, that mission. “It’s not a win from the point of view of global mass quality,” says Newfield. Still, the blend of idealism and financial logic driving this trend, on both sides, means that elite American universities are likely to continue to pursue foreign patrons for the foreseeable future.</p><p><em>Editor’s Note: This story has been modified from its original version.</em><br>
</p>
http://www.newsweek.com/should-top-us-colleges-expand-overseas-62847Tue, 05 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0500College Rankings 2012: Top Sororities http://www.newsweek.com/college-rankings-2012-top-sororities-64461
<p>There are 26 organizations in the National Panhellenic Conference, with reputations and memberships that vary by campus. To analyze which sororities have the largest national footprint, most devoted sisters, and greatest philanthropic footprint, we compared the 26 Panhellenic Conference sororities based on the number of active collegiate chapters, the number of Twitter followers and Facebook fans (to measure alumni and member interest) and the amount of money the sorority’s non-profit fund donated to 501(c)(3) organizations according the most recent public filing (funds were normalized using a per-chapter ratio). Funds donated to individual chapters, classified as a 501(c)(7) non-profit social club, were not considered for this aspect of the ranking.</p><p>We attempted to get an accurate count of the current number of active collegiate chapters from a variety of sources, and contacted all sororities to verify. Several sororities and The National Panhellenic Conference declined to participate or comment for this article due to their governance policies.</p><p><b>25. Theta Phi Alpha<br />
<br />
Active Collegiate Chapters: </b>94<b><br />
Twitter Followers: </b>1,831<b><br />
Facebook Fans: </b>5,122<b><br />
Funds donated through the Theta Phi Alpha Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$6,761</p><p><b>24. Alpha Epsilon Phi<br />
<br />
Active Collegiate Chapters: </b>45<b><br />
Twitter Followers: </b>3,103<b><br />
Facebook Fans: </b>1,290<b><br />
Funds donated through the Alpha Epsilon Phi Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$23,571</p><p><b>23. Sigma Delta Tau<br />
<br />
Active Collegiate Chapters: </b>61<b><br />
Twitter Followers: </b>3,281<b><br />
Facebook Fans: </b>4,120<b><br />
Funds donated through the Sigma Delta Tau Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$13,250<b></b></p><p><b>22. Alpha Sigma Alpha<br />
<br />
Active Collegiate Chapters: </b>86<b><br />
Twitter Followers: </b>3,640<b><br />
Facebook Fans: </b>11,553<b><br />
Funds donated through the Alpha Sigma Alpha Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$10,375</p><p><b>21. Alpha Sigma Tau<br />
<br />
Active Collegiate Chapters: </b>80<b><br />
Twitter Followers: </b>3,567<b><br />
Facebook Fans: </b>6,379<b><br />
Funds donated through the Alpha Sigma Tau Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$54,340</p><p><b>20. Phi Sigma Sigma<br />
<br />
Active Collegiate Chapters: </b>109<b><br />
Twitter Followers: </b>3,347<b><br />
Facebook Fans: </b>12,908<b><br />
Funds donated through the Phi Sigma Sigma Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$78,675</p><p><b>19. Sigma Sigma Sigma<br />
<br />
Active Collegiate Chapters: </b>108<b><br />
Twitter Followers: </b>4,479<b><br />
Facebook Fans: </b>16,514<b><br />
Funds donated through the Sigma Sigma Sigma Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$40,600</p><p><b>18. Alpha Xi Delta <br />
<br />
Active Collegiate Chapters: </b>116<b><br />
Twitter Followers: </b>6,792<b><br />
Facebook Fans: </b>16,569<b><br />
Funds donated through the Alpha Xi Delta Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$47,200</p><p><b>17. Alpha Gamma Delta<br />
<br />
Active Collegiate Chapters: </b>112<b><br />
Twitter Followers: </b>7,090<b><br />
Facebook Fans: </b>13,581<b><br />
Funds donated through the Alpha Gamma Delta Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$234,765</p><p><b>16. Sigma Kappa <br />
<br />
Active Collegiate Chapters: </b>112<b><br />
Twitter Followers: </b>8,900<b><br />
Facebook Fans: </b>21,572<b><br />
Funds donated through the Sigma Kappa Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$67,070</p><p><b>15. Phi Mu</b></p><p><b>Active Collegiate Chapters: </b>115<b><br />
Twitter Followers: </b>10,043<b><br />
Facebook Fans: </b>24,369<b><br />
Funds donated through the Phi Mu Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$77,000</p><p><b>14. Gamma Phi Beta<br />
<br />
Active Collegiate Chapters: </b>125<b><br />
Twitter Followers: </b>6,892<b><br />
Facebook Fans: </b>20,829<br />
<b>Funds donated through the Gamma Phi Beta Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$497,675</p><p><b>13. Alpha Chi Omega<br />
<br />
Active Collegiate Chapters: </b>133<b><br />
Twitter Followers: </b>8,684<b><br />
Facebook Fans: </b>28,918<b><br />
Funds donated through the Alpha Chi Omega Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$106,675</p><p><b>12. Delta Zeta<br />
<br />
Active Collegiate Chapters: </b>158<br />
<b>Twitter Followers: </b>9,332<br />
<b>Facebook Fans: </b>14,986<br />
<b>Funds donated through the Delta Zeta Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$281,668<b></b></p><p><b>11. Kappa Alpha Theta<br />
<br />
Active Collegiate Chapters: </b>129<b><br />
Twitter Followers: </b>8,344<b><br />
Facebook Fans: </b>19,218<b><br />
Funds donated through the Kappa Alpha Theta Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$695,242</p><p><b>10. Alpha Phi <br />
<br />
Active Collegiate Chapters: </b>157<b><br />
Twitter Followers: </b>11,065<b><br />
Facebook Fans: </b>13,915<b><br />
Funds donated through the Alpha Phi Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$342935</p><p><b>9. Alpha Omicron Pi <br />
<br />
Active Collegiate Chapters: </b>191<b><br />
Twitter Followers: </b>7,938<b><br />
Facebook Fans: </b>15,401<b><br />
Funds donated through the Alpha Omicron Pi Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$521,380</p><p><b>8. Delta Delta Delta<br />
<br />
Active Collegiate Chapters: </b>138<b><br />
Twitter Followers: </b>11,133<b><br />
Facebook Fans: </b>21,600<b><br />
Funds donated through the Delta Delta Delta Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b><b></b>$264,508</p><p><b>7. Kappa Delta<br />
<br />
Active Collegiate Chapters: </b>142<b><br />
Twitter Followers: </b>12,789<b><br />
Facebook Fans: </b>13,492<b><br />
Funds donated through the Kappa Delta Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$414,793</p><p><b>6. Pi Beta Phi<br />
<br />
Active Collegiate Chapters: </b>135<b><br />
Twitter Followers: </b>8,900<b><br />
Facebook Fans: </b>27,585<b><br />
Funds donated through the Pi Beta Phi Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$522,696</p><p><b>5. Chi Omega<br />
<br />
Active Collegiate Chapters: </b>174<b><br />
Twitter Followers: </b>10,189<b><br />
Facebook Fans: </b>35,569<b><br />
Funds donated through the Chi Omega Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$85,971</p><p><b>4. Alpha Delta Pi<br />
<br />
Active Collegiate Chapters: </b>142<b><br />
Twitter Followers: </b>11,217<b><br />
Facebook Fans: </b>34,945<b><br />
Funds donated through the Alpha Delta Pi Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$120,957</p><p><b>3.&nbsp; Kappa Kappa Gamma<br>
<br>
Active Collegiate Chapters:&nbsp;</b>138<b><br>
Twitter Followers:&nbsp;</b>12,039<b><br>
Facebook Fans:&nbsp;</b>31,602<b><br>
Funds donated through the Kappa Kappa Gamma Foundation to 501(c)(3)s:&nbsp;</b>$624,500</p>
<p><b>2. Delta Gamma<br />
<br />
Active Collegiate Chapters: </b>147<b><br />
Twitter Followers: </b>11,835<b><br />
Facebook Fans: </b>32,717<b><br />
Funds donated through the Delta Gamma Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$792,499</p><p><b>1. Zeta Tau Alpha <br />
<br />
Active Collegiate Chapters: </b><b></b>159<b><br />
Twitter Followers: </b>11,995<b><br />
Facebook Fans: </b>40,647<b><br />
Funds donated through the Zeta Tau Alpha Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$384,039 <br />
</p><p><strong><u><a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/videos/2012/08/04/college-rankings-where-s-yours.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">WATCH VIDEO! Learn how you can respond to our rankings</a></u>. </strong><br>
</p>
http://www.newsweek.com/college-rankings-2012-top-sororities-64461Mon, 06 Aug 2012 01:00:00 -04002012’s Best Colleges For Youhttp://www.newsweek.com/2012s-best-colleges-you-64495
<p>College comparisons have be-come a national obsession. However gloomy the job prospects for graduates in a stuttering economy, the truth is that high-school-age Americans who elect to go to college have never been more spoiled for choice. The postsecondary system has expanded with dizzying fervor—since 1970 the number of institutions of higher learning has soared by 78 percent, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded annually has doubled, and the cohort of full-time students enrolled in college has grown 120 percent. But the boom has, in truth, been something of a bust. College has never been more expensive, and a degree has never been less professionally valuable, which makes the choice of where to go and what to learn all the more critical.</p><p>With the proliferation of surveys and data, students now have all the information they need to find the perfect fit. And most do: if given the chance to do it all again, nearly three fourths of college undergrads would make the same school choice, according to a survey of students attending America’s top 700 universities and colleges. Perhaps the grass isn’t always greener at the U across the way. For its third annual college-rankings package, <em>Newsweek </em>assessed schools by specific factors, both practical and existential. Long-term affordability. Student happiness. Colleges for students with a politically liberal bent or a conservative philosophy. Schools that provide the highest levels of academic challenge, and those that create the most stressful environments.</p><p>To create our rankings, we tailored the sources and methodologies to fit the topic. For half of the lists, we partnered with College Prowler, one of the most comprehensive online resources for information on colleges and student life. College Prowler provided data on student contentment, politics, campus culture, and peer opinion. We also culled information from the National Center for Education Statistics, the Institute for College Access &amp; Success, PayScale, CollegeView, and the College Board.</p><p>The lists we chose to focus on this year deal with the quality of life at American colleges and universities. And in addition to affordability and experience, for the first time we considered the Greek system. Frat houses and sororities suffered a steep decline in the Vietnam War era and recovered their popularity in the late 1980s; in the past few years there’s been a slight uptick in Greek-social-club membership. Because sororities and fraternities are particularly private and guarded about their reputations, we analyzed public data on the more than 100 organizations that are members of the National Panhellenic Conference and North-American Interfraternity Conference.</p><p><a href="/content/newsweek/features/2012/college-rankings.html">Click here to see the full rankings and methodologies</a><a href="/content/dailybeast/features/2012/08/college-rankings.html"></a>. Happy hunting.</p>
http://www.newsweek.com/2012s-best-colleges-you-64495Mon, 06 Aug 2012 01:00:00 -0400College Rankings 2012: Top Fraternities http://www.newsweek.com/college-rankings-2012-top-fraternities-64505
<p>For all the attention devoted to the hazing practices and bullying of a few collegiate fraternities, the average Greek frat brother is more active in his community and has a higher G.P.A. than his non-fraternity peers. In order to compare the 75 fraternities that are members of the North-American Interfraternity Conference, we first considered the number of active collegiate chapters for each. We also considered the number of alumni who are currently members of the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives, as well as the alumni, if any, who became president. Lastly, we considered the amount of money the fraternity’s non-profit fund donated to 501(c)(3) organizations according the most recent public filing (funds were normalized using a per-chapter ratio). Funds donated to individual chapters, classified as a 501(c)(7) non-profit social club, were not considered for this aspect of the ranking.</p>
<p><b>25. Delta Upsilon (ΔY)</b><br />
<br />
<b>Active Collegiate Chapters:</b> 76<br />
<b>Number of Congressional Alumni:</b> 3<br />
<b>Number of Presidential Alumni: </b>1<br />
<b>Funds donated through the Delta Upsilon Foundation to 501(c)(3)s:</b>$35,022<b></b></p><p><b>24. Phi Beta Sigma (ΦBΣ)</b><br />
<br />
<b>Active Collegiate Chapters:</b> 152<br />
<b>Number of Congressional Alumni:</b> 2<br />
<b>Number of Presidential Alumni: </b>1<br />
<b>Funds donated through the Phi Beta Sigma Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$0<b></b></p><p><b>23. Phi Kappa Sigma (ΦKΣ)</b><br />
<br />
<b>Active Collegiate Chapters:</b> 48<br />
<b>Number of Congressional Alumni:</b> n/a<br />
<b>Number of Presidential Alumni: </b>n/a<br />
<b>Funds donated through the Phi Kappa Sigma Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$157,843<b></b></p><p><b>22. Delta Chi (ΔX)</b><br />
<br />
<b>Active Collegiate Chapters:</b> 135<br />
<b>Number of Congressional Alumni:</b> 4<br />
<b>Number of Presidential Alumni: </b>1<br />
<b>Funds donated through the Delta Chi Foundation to 501(c)(3)s:</b>$23,603<b></b></p><p><b>21. Beta Theta Pi (BΘΠ)</b><br />
<br />
<b>Active Collegiate Chapters:</b> 128<br />
<b>Number of Congressional Alumni:</b> 7<br />
<b>Number of Presidential Alumni: </b>n/a<br />
<b>Funds donated through the Beta Theta Pi Foundation to 501(c)(3)s:</b>$0<b></b></p><p><b>20. Iota Phi Theta (IΦΘ)</b><br />
<br />
<b>Active Collegiate Chapters:</b> 270<br />
<b>Number of Congressional Alumni:</b> 1<br />
<b>Number of Presidential Alumni: </b>n/a<br />
<b>Funds donated through the Iota Phi Theta Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$0<b></b></p><p><b>19. Sigma Alpha Mu (ΣAM)</b><br />
<br />
<b>Active Collegiate Chapters:</b> 52<br />
<b>Number of Congressional Alumni:</b> n/a<br />
<b>Number of Presidential Alumni: </b>n/a<br />
<b>Funds donated through the Sigma Alpha Mu Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$123,950<b></b></p><p><b>18. Alpha Tau Omega (ATΩ)</b><br />
<br />
<b>Active Collegiate Chapters:</b> 132<br />
<b>Number of Congressional Alumni:</b> n/a<br />
<b>Number of Presidential Alumni: </b>n/a<br />
<b>Funds donated through the Alpha Tau Omega Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$114,711<b></b></p><p><b>17. Pi Kappa Phi (ΠKΦ)</b><br />
<br />
<b>Active Collegiate Chapters:</b> 155<br />
<b>Number of Congressional Alumni:</b> 2<br />
<b>Number of Presidential Alumni: </b>n/a<br />
<b>Funds donated through the Pi Kappa Phi Foundation to 501(c)(3)s:</b>$73,765<b></b></p><p><b>16. Tau Kappa Epsilon (TKE)</b><br />
<br />
<b>Active Collegiate Chapters:</b> 292<br />
<b>Number of Congressional Alumni:</b> 3<br />
<b>Number of Presidential Alumni: </b>1<br />
<b>Funds donated through the Tau Kappa Epsilon Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$0<b></b></p><p><b>15. Pi Kappa Alpha (ΠKA)</b><br />
<br />
<b>Active Collegiate Chapters:</b> 224<br />
<b>Number of Congressional Alumni:</b> 4<br />
<b>Number of Presidential Alumni: </b>n/a<br />
<b>Funds donated through the Pi Kappa Alpha Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$58,406<b></b></p><p><b>14. Lambda Chi Alpha (ΛXA)</b><br />
<br />
<b>Active Collegiate Chapters:</b> 192<br />
<b>Number of Congressional Alumni:</b> 6<br />
<b>Number of Presidential Alumni: </b>1<br />
<b>Funds donated through the Lambda Chi Alpha Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$50,238<b></b></p><p><b>13. Phi Kappa Tau (ΦKT)</b><br />
<br />
<b>Active Collegiate Chapters:</b> 77<br />
<b>Number of Congressional Alumni:</b> 3<br />
<b>Number of Presidential Alumni: </b>n/a<br />
<b>Funds donated through the Phi Kappa Tau Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$102,609<b></b></p><p><b>12. Kappa Alpha Psi (KAΨ)</b><br />
<br />
<b>Active Collegiate Chapters:</b> 408<br />
<b>Number of Congressional Alumni:</b> 5<br />
<b>Number of Presidential Alumni: </b>n/a<br />
<b>Funds donated through the Kappa Alpha Psi Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$0<b></b></p><p><b>11. Delta Tau Delta (ΔTΔ)</b><br />
<br />
<b>Active Collegiate Chapters:</b> 130<br />
<b>Number of Congressional Alumni:</b> 6<br />
<b>Number of Presidential Alumni: </b>n/a<br />
<b>Funds donated through the Delta Tau Delta Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$90,457<b></b></p><p><b>10. Alpha Phi Alpha (AΦA)</b><br />
<br />
<b>Active Collegiate Chapters:</b> 414<br />
<b>Number of Congressional Alumni:</b> 6<br />
<b>Number of Presidential Alumni: </b>n/a<br />
<b>Funds donated through the Alpha Phi Alpha Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$0<b></b></p><p><b>9. Kappa Alpha Order (KA)</b><br />
<br />
<b>Active Collegiate Chapters:</b> 124<br />
<b>Number of Congressional Alumni:</b> 5<br />
<b>Number of Presidential Alumni: </b>n/a<br />
<b>Funds donated through the Kappa Alpha Order Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$118,115<b></b></p><p><b>8. Sigma Phi Epsilon (ΣΦE)</b><br />
<br />
<b>Active Collegiate Chapters:</b> 240<br />
<b>Number of Congressional Alumni:</b> n/a<br />
<b>Number of Presidential Alumni: </b>n/a<br />
<b>Funds donated through the Sigma Phi Epsilon Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$219,538<b></b></p><p><b>7. Alpha Gamma Rho (AΓP)</b><br />
<br />
<b>Active Collegiate Chapters:</b> 70<br />
<b>Number of Congressional Alumni:</b> 4<br />
<b>Number of Presidential Alumni: </b>n/a<br />
<b>Funds donated through the Alpha Gamma Rho Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$1,397,891<b></b></p><p><b>6. Alpha Epsilon Pi (AEΠ)</b><br />
<br />
<b>Active Collegiate Chapters:</b> 155<br />
<b>Number of Congressional Alumni:</b> 1<br />
<b>Number of Presidential Alumni: </b>n/a<br />
<b>Funds donated through the Alpha Epsilon Pi Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$178,067<b></b></p><p><b>5. Sigma Nu (ΣN)</b><br />
<br />
<b>Active Collegiate Chapters:</b> 175<br />
<b>Number of Congressional Alumni:</b> 8<br />
<b>Number of Presidential Alumni: </b>n/a<br />
<b>Funds donated through the Sigma Nu Foundation to 501(c)(3)s:</b>$143,921<b></b></p><p><b>4. Theta Chi (ΘX)</b><br />
<br />
<b>Active Collegiate Chapters:</b> 133<br />
<b>Number of Congressional Alumni:</b> 2<br />
<b>Number of Presidential Alumni: </b>n/a<br />
<b>Funds donated through the Theta Chi Foundation to 501(c)(3)s:</b>$278,962<b></b></p><p><b>3. Phi Gamma Delta (FIJI)</b><br />
<br />
<b>Active Collegiate Chapters:</b> 123<br />
<b>Number of Congressional Alumni:</b> 3<br />
<b>Number of Presidential Alumni: </b>1<br />
<b>Funds donated through the Phi Gamma Delta Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$424,525<b></b></p><p><b>2. Sigma Alpha Epsilon (ΣAE)</b><br />
<br />
<b>Active Collegiate Chapters:</b> 246<br />
<b>Number of Congressional Alumni:</b> 9<br />
<b>Number of Presidential Alumni: </b>1<br />
<b>Funds donated through the Sigma Alpha Epsilon Foundation to 501(c)(3)s: </b>$242,225<b></b></p><p><b>1. Sigma Chi (ΣX)</b><br />
<br />
<b>Active Collegiate Chapters:</b> 246<br />
<b>Number of Congressional Alumni:</b> 11<br />
<b>Number of Presidential Alumni: </b>1<br />
<b>Funds donated through the Sigma Chi Foundation to 501(c)(3)s:</b>$1,436,883</p><p><strong><a href="/content/dailybeast/newsweek/features/2012/college-rankings.html">Click here to see all the college rankings—from most beautiful to most rigorous and more.</a></strong><br>
</p>
<p><strong><u><a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/videos/2012/08/04/college-rankings-where-s-yours.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">WATCH VIDEO! Learn how you can respond to our rankings</a></u>. </strong><br>
</p>
http://www.newsweek.com/college-rankings-2012-top-fraternities-64505Mon, 06 Aug 2012 01:00:00 -0400Roosevelt Island: New York’s New Tech Hubhttp://www.newsweek.com/roosevelt-island-new-yorks-new-tech-hub-65645
<p>In a sliver of land in New York City’s East River, where a lunatic asylum and smallpox hospital once stood, banners proclaim with unabashed assurance (or chutzpah): “Roosevelt Island: A Fresh Look at the Big Apple.”</p><p>The bleak cityscape on the lower half of the island, accessible by cable car and occupied by a hospital for convalescents with battered bricks and rusting air conditioners, will soon be home to a complex of buildings intended to transform the island from an image of urban decay to a bold statement about 21st-century urban design—and transform New York City into an enduring 21st-century economic powerhouse.</p><p>In an unprecedented cooperative venture between City Hall, Cornell University, and the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, ground is about to be broken for a top-flight technology campus that Mayor Michael Bloomberg promises will give other hubs of entrepreneurial science around the country, and indeed the world, “a run for their money.”</p><p>For the moment, the campus exists as an interinstitutional agreement, some architectural drawings, and the glimmer in the eye of an ambitious city executive who made his own vast personal fortune with information technology. (“This is going to be a very big hit,” says Bloomberg, as of course he would.) But deliberately and relentlessly, the Big Apple has, in the last few years, been going after the same kind of power and preeminence in high technology that it enjoys in so many other fields; and the graduate school is a key to City Hall’s strategic plan for digital conquest.</p><p>To realize the project, the city will provide much of the land and about $100 million in funding. Add to that a huge donation by Chuck Feeney, an 81-year-old duty-free magnate and Cornell alumnus, who has put up $350 million to see the first stage of construction through to completion. Early drawings of what it might look like (such as the one shown here) were impressive. But the noted Los Angeles–based architect Thom Mayne, who created the provocative, twisted, and torn Cooper Union building in the East Village, is expected to make it spectacular.</p><p>Until the complex is built, however, students at what’s now called CornellNYC Tech will be studying in the big old brick building in Chelsea that Google bought for almost $2 billion two years ago: an outpost of the West Coast’s mellow intensity under the roof of the enormous structure that used to house the Port Authority in Manhattan. (It’s even got some real-life chutes and ladders for techies who want to have a little fun getting from one floor to another. The reviews on Google+ declare it, not surprisingly, “awesome.”)</p><p>The graduate curriculum is designed to draw on talent and innovation in the many fields—global finance, medicine, media, design, and fashion—where New York City is already a powerhouse. Greg Pass, a former&nbsp;Chief Technology Officer at Twitter who’s signed on with the Cornell–Technion team to help bring entrepreneurship into the mix, says the project offers “a huge opportunity to disrupt the higher-educational model.”</p>
<p>If New York has yet to make its mark in digital innovation the way Silicon Valley has done—with Stanford as its engine of innovation, or even Boston, with MIT—some vital trends are moving in its direction. “You’ve got to understand how big we are,” says Bloomberg, citing an encounter with a friend from Boston who told him, when the Roosevelt Island project was first being proposed, “Oh, you’ll never succeed because Boston is the education capital of the country.” Bloomberg says he told his friend bluntly: “New York City has more undergraduate and graduate college students than Boston has people.” That, he said with a chuckle, “sort of ended that argument.”</p><p>Like Google, with its $2 billion Chelsea building, some of the most important tech companies have been looking east. Twitter opened major offices on Madison Avenue last year, and eBay announced in May that it’s moving some of its units to the Flatiron neighborhood. “They want to be in a big city,” where, culturally, intellectually, financially, there are “more of the best and the brightest,” says Bloomberg. “If intellectual capital is what you need, New York City is where you want to be.”</p><p>Pass, who was packing up his house in San Francisco when I reached him on the phone, said New York offers something new. “There already is a Silicon Valley with its outcomes,” he says. “The fact that the culture is different is positive.”</p><p>But those cultures—East Coast and West Coast competing for digital supremacy—came to a showdown over Roosevelt Island in a story that involves billions of dollars, intense rivalries, and some pretty nasty accusations of bad faith.</p><p>The ambitious plans for New York City’s tech future were originally shaped by Deputy Mayor Robert Steel and Seth Pinsky, head of the NYC Economic Development Corporation, and, grandiose as they may seem, they were based on very practical considerations.</p><p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2012/07/29/1343435351810.cached.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed">
<!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]-->
<source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2012/07/29/1343435351810.cached.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)" />
<source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2012/07/29/1343435351810.cached.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)" />
<source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2012/07/29/1343435351810.cached.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)" />
<source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2012/07/29/1343435351810.cached.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)" />
<source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2012/07/29/1343435351810.cached.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)" />
<!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]-->
<img itemprop="contentUrl" width="961" height="641" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2012/07/29/1343435351810.cached.jpg" alt="cornell-tech-campus-fe01-2ndary" title="" />
</picture> <span class="figcaption">
<span class="caption" itemprop="caption">
Stanford submitted a competing plan to work with the city to implement the mayor’s vision. Suddenly it pulled out of the competition. </span>
<span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder">
Stanford University-Ennead Architects-Image by Redsquare Inc. </span>
</span>
</span>
</p><p>When Bloomberg was elected mayor in 2001, only weeks after the devastating terrorist attack on Sept. 11, a centerpiece of his strategy for the resurrection of the city was to reassure, rebuild, and expand its financial-services industry. For most of the decade, that emphasis worked stupendously well. Financial services were “a supercharged aspect of our economy,” says Steel. Then came 2008, with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the implosion, or near to it, of one big investment house and bank after another.</p><p>Bloomberg’s focus changed. New York would have to diversify its economy, he insisted, and technology would be the key. “Many large companies were laying off significant numbers of people,” says Pinsky.</p><p>Earlier efforts to build more diversity into the city’s economy with other projects—tourism, film and television production, and a commercial bioscience industry among them—couldn’t take up all the slack. “If we didn’t do something to redeploy people, it was likely we were going to lose them,” says Pinsky. And given that the downturn was crippling big corporations, City Hall decided an alternative would be entrepreneurship. “We set up a series of incubators, about a dozen,” says Pinsky, and those have spawned, so far, some 550 businesses. “We find landlords in the city who have real estate that is currently underused and we work to encourage them to offer that space at subsidized rates.” Then the city helps organize mentors for startups and seed capital to fund them. It recently created a digital map that shows exactly where tech companies are looking for employees, and where investors are who might help create new companies.</p><p>But even as these projects grew, so did a constant complaint: New York City, for all its great colleges and universities, just didn’t have enough talented engineers to staff its developing high-tech industries. And what it lacked conspicuously was the kind of academic institution that dealt symbiotically with entrepreneurial businesses in the applied sciences. One obvious paradigm was Stanford and Silicon Valley out West, but another also loomed far across the seas to the east, in Israel.</p><p>As it happened, at just that moment in 2009 Dan Senor and Saul Singer published <i>Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle</i>, which quickly became a <i>New York Times</i> bestseller and the talk of City Hall. As Israeli President Shimon Peres says in his introduction to the paperback edition, it tells the story of people “who positioned their country as a critical research-and-development center for the world’s leading technology companies.” And one player in that process was Technion, a venerable institute in Haifa since the 1920s that’s often called the Israeli MIT. Technion has links to the Israeli defense industry, which has in turn played a huge role in developing the country’s tech sector. Technion president Peretz Lavie told me proudly over the phone that Technion alumni developed the Iron Dome missile-defense system that helps protect the south of Israel from rockets flying out of Gaza. Technion can also boast three Nobel Prize laureates since 2004, and, perhaps more to the point from New York’s point of view, “We have turned our students into entrepreneurs,” says Lavie. About 80 percent of Technion graduates go into high-tech industries, and about a quarter into startups. “If you think of Israel as a big Silicon Valley,” he says, “the backbone of this Silicon Valley are Technion graduates.”</p><p>In New York City, that sounded just right. At the beginning of 2010, New York’s economic-development corporation started contacting “major engineering faculties around the world,” according to Pinsky. And one of the first was Technion. As Lavie told <i>Newsweek</i>, the institute’s strategic goal was “to have international visibility and global standing,” but “New York—we never thought about it.” Then in March 2010, says Paul Feigin, Technion’s senior vice president, “we actually got a call from the New York City Economic Development Corporation asking us what would make us interested in opening in New York City.”</p><p>Months passed as City Hall got ready to call for formal expressions of interest in the creation of an institute for applied sciences. Lavie wasn’t sure how interested Technion should be. “Then one day I got a personal letter from Mayor Bloomberg,” Lavie told <i>Newsweek</i>. “And Mayor Bloomberg invited us to participate in the competition. I must tell you, at the beginning I thought somebody was pulling my leg. I called them, and I found out this was for real.” The city told Technion it wanted “to copy Silicon Valley” into “the New York econo-system,” says Lavie, but he was still cautious. “We decided to participate under two conditions,” he told Newsweek. “One, that we are not going to invest any money. And second that we must have an American partner.”</p><p>In December 2010, New York City publicly called for formal proposals for the institute from around the world, and the race really began.</p><p>When Cornell president David Skorton first saw how ambitious City Hall’s plans for the Roosevelt Island project were, he was stunned: “I never thought I would have a chance to do something like this,” says Skorton. Cornell, like many other universities, has experience setting up satellite campuses abroad, including a medical school in Qatar, and it has had some facilities and programs in New York City for the better part of a century. But “I did not see this solicitation coming with anything like the form that it took,” he says. The goal was to create an institution that would be known not only for technological innovation but for “tech in the service of commerce,” as Skorton puts it.</p><p>By last summer, some 18 proposals were submitted, and very quickly thereafter it looked like Stanford, that über-incubator of California’s Silicon Valley, would have the inside track for what it called the “StanfordNYC innovation chain.” But as more plans got firmer and the commitments demanded from the participants got bigger, Cornell and Technion teamed up and started to look unbeatable.</p><p>Suddenly, in the very last days of the competition, Stanford pulled out of the race altogether. “It took Stanford aback, the way we were treated,” says the university’s communications director, Lisa Lapin. “We got a sense that it was more of an antagonistic relationship than a welcoming one.” Lapin forwarded to <i>Newsweek</i> a blistering statement from Stanford general counsel Debra Zumwalt saying many of the positions taken by the city “were not in good faith.” “In my decades of doing negotiations with both private parties and government agencies, I have never seen anything like it,” said Zumwalt. “It was clear from our negotiations ... that the city would not be working as a partner with Stanford and indeed would be making it more difficult and expensive than necessary to get this project done successfully,” said Zumwalt.</p><p>There were specific issues about hefty penalties that Stanford was expected to pay even if the city was responsible for delays or other difficulties. “Stanford wanted to work with New York City to implement the mayor’s bold vision for a transformative technology campus. We reluctantly came to the conclusion that the city could not deliver on that promise and decided to withdraw.”</p><p>Out in Palo Alto, Calif., some people feel Stanford was set up for a fall right from the beginning, suckered into giving the project the prestige of the Stanford name. City Hall maintains it was just driving a hard bargain, getting all the contenders to put as much as possible into the project, with as many protections as possible for the New York City taxpayer. “I think Stanford came into the competition thinking they were the odds-on favorite,” one city official suggested, “and I think that at the end of the day it became a bigger obligation than they felt comfortable making.”</p><p>Mayor Bloomberg, for his part, notes that other big projects are taking shape, including a new New York University–affiliated applied-sciences institute in Brooklyn, and he would still like to see Stanford set up shop in New York City. “I’d love to have them come,” he told Newsweek, “and there is still plenty of room here.”</p><p>In the end, Cornell simply had an overwhelming home-court advantage that makes it close to the perfect choice for the core project on Roosevelt Island, and gives it the resources and political connections to get the job done. Cornell has always had a strong focus on engineering, and it has always put an emphasis on the practical applications of the many disciplines it teaches. It was founded as a land-grant college in the 19th century with the explicit aim of instructing students in “the mechanical arts.” So there is no problem with the notion that academics and entrepreneurs can work together, whether teaching or starting new businesses.</p><p>Feeney, the extraordinary philanthropist who is funding the first phase of CornellNYC Tech development, is also playing a quiet but important role shaping its vision, according to Skorton. (Feeney is a graduate of Cornell’s hotel school.) “When he got interested, he got interested in a very intense way,” says the university president. The low-profile Feeney may have given away $6 billion around the world, and quietly, but he’s no soft touch. “He’s a businessperson,” says Skorton. “He has that combination of intelligence, insight, and impatience that gets things done.” And Feeney’s not the only Cornell alumnus in New York City. The university’s main campus is upstate in Ithaca (“centrally isolated,” as they like to say), but it counts about 50,000 former students in the five boroughs and environs. In short, it’s got the kind of network that might be used, should the occasion arise, to get the City Council to waive any unjust penalties of the kind that Stanford found potentially so disturbing.</p><p>In a city—and a business—that is changing constantly, Skorton says he intends to keep the curriculum flexible.</p><p>“You can’t put something in and allow it to ossify,” he says. But from the moment classes begin this fall, the aim is to be, well, awesome. </p><p>
<i>Luke Kerr Dineen contributed to this report.</i></p>http://www.newsweek.com/roosevelt-island-new-yorks-new-tech-hub-65645Mon, 30 Jul 2012 01:00:00 -0400Our Report Card on the 1,000 That Make the Gradehttp://www.newsweek.com/our-report-card-1000-make-grade-64831
<p>Good news: despite shrunken state coffers, the quality of public schools is by many measures improving. In the decade-plus since <i>Newsweek</i> began ranking the top public high schools, the national graduation rate has increased 4&nbsp;percent, federal expenditure per student has risen an adjusted $1,400, and the number of Advanced Placement (AP) tests given per school has more than doubled. The gold standard, of course, is college readiness, and the numbers are bright there too: between 1999 and 2009, the proportion of 18-to-24-year-olds enrolled in college rose by 14 percent.</p>
<p>Who is leading the charge? This year, our ranking highlights the best 1,000 public high schools in the nation—the ones that have proven to be the most effective in turning out college-ready grads. At these schools, 91 percent were accepted to college, with an average AP score of 3.4 (out of 5 )—21 percent above the 2.8 average for public-school students.</p><p>The schools that made our top 1,000 tend to be relatively small and concentrated in metropolitan areas. Seventy-four percent have fewer than 2,000 students, and more than one quarter are located in or near New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles. The collective student body at these schools is better off financially than the national average: only 17.5 percent receive free-or reduced-price lunch, compared with about 40 percent nationally.</p><p>Nearly 77 percent of the 1,000 admit students through open enrollment, with no admissions restrictions. But many of the highest spots were claimed by selective schools—where students are let in by academic achievement, admissions testing, or lottery—which makes sense given the growth of magnet, charter, and other specialty schools around the country: seven out of the top 10 schools on our list are either charter or magnet.</p><p>Those highest-ranking schools share a heavy emphasis on challenging students with college-level academics. At the Gatton Academy of Mathematics and Science, in Bowling Green, Ky.—which came in first place—nearly all courses are university-level: in 2011, the school averaged almost five AP exams per student. Overall, the 6,514 students at the top 10 schools averaged 2.5 AP and similar International Baccalaureate exams per student.</p><p>To reach these rankings, we factored in six criteria. Three of those—the four-year graduation rate, college-acceptance rate, and number of AP and other high-level exams given per student—make up 75 percent of the overall score. Average SAT/ACT and AP/college-level test scores count for another 10 percent each, and the number of AP courses offered per student is weighted as the final 5 percent. Because most of this data isn’t centrally available, we collected it from high-school administrators directly—about 15,000 of them—and received 2,300 responses.</p><p><a href="/content/newsweek/2012/05/20/a-look-at-america-s-best-high-schools-2012.html">
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2012/05/20/1337481612325.cached.png">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="640" height="426" class="mapping-embed">
<!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]-->
<source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2012/05/20/1337481612325.cached.png 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)" />
<source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2012/05/20/1337481612325.cached.png 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)" />
<source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2012/05/20/1337481612325.cached.png 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)" />
<source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2012/05/20/1337481612325.cached.png 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)" />
<source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2012/05/20/1337481612325.cached.png 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)" />
<!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]-->
<img itemprop="contentUrl" width="640" height="426" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2012/05/20/1337481612325.cached.png" alt="carousel-map-image" title="" />
</picture> </span>
</a></p>http://www.newsweek.com/our-report-card-1000-make-grade-64831Mon, 21 May 2012 01:00:00 -0400Get Your Best High School Bumper Stickerhttp://www.newsweek.com/get-your-best-high-school-bumper-sticker-64845
<p>
<span class="figure embed" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" itemprop="image" itemid="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2012/05/20/1337542005958.cached.jpg">
<picture itemprop="contentUrl" width="600" height="400" class="mapping-embed">
<!--[if IE 9]><video style="display: none;"><![endif]-->
<source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2012/05/20/1337542005958.cached.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 1200px)" />
<source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2012/05/20/1337542005958.cached.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 992px)" />
<source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2012/05/20/1337542005958.cached.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 768px)" />
<source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-tablet/public/2012/05/20/1337542005958.cached.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 481px)" />
<source srcset="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-sm/public/2012/05/20/1337542005958.cached.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 0px)" />
<!--[if IE 9]></video><![endif]-->
<img itemprop="contentUrl" width="600" height="400" class="mapping-embed" src="http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embed-lg/public/2012/05/20/1337542005958.cached.jpg" alt="bumper-mykid-goes-to-newsweekdailybeast-best-highschool" title="" />
</picture> </span>
</p>http://www.newsweek.com/get-your-best-high-school-bumper-sticker-64845Sun, 20 May 2012 15:20:00 -0400Newsweek Ranks Kentucky Academy as America’s Top High Schoolhttp://www.newsweek.com/newsweek-ranks-kentucky-academy-americas-top-high-school-64899
<p>To call the Gatton Academy of Mathematics and Science a high school, you&apos;d have to suspend an element of reality. You’ll find no football games, pep rallies, or dismissal bells on the Kentucky campus. Instead you’d find couches designed for study halls and white boards scribbled with advanced math. Last week, one student even walked around campus in a t-shirt proclaiming, &quot;Extreme science: What a rush.&quot;</p><p>Welcome to Gatton. Or as administrators affectionately call it, the crucible—a place with admittedly high pressure, but where every student succeeds. The school has another title, too: America's best public high school, according to <a href="/content/newsweek/2012/05/20/america-s-best-high-schools.html"><em>Newsweek</em>'s 2012 ranking of the top 1,000</a>. On every metric used—test scores, and graduation and college matriculation rates—Gatton sets the nation’s curve.</p>
<p>The school, about 100 miles south of Louisville in verdant Bowling Green, Kentucky, is a public school with selective admission based only on past academic performance—a key quality that separates Gatton from other public schools, which are mostly mandated to seek economic and racial diversity.</p><p>Once students are in, they’re given broad autonomy to pursue subjects that interest them: They befriend their instructors and conduct scientific research. During semester breaks, the school helps students study abroad. Last winter, the offerings were Western Europe and Costa Rica.</p><p>It is, you might note, a bit like college.</p><p>That’s precisely the idea. Back in 2007, generous funding from the Kentucky statehouse brought Gatton to life. The facility, a five-story building about the size of one football field, was built for 126 lucky and ambitious minds. Students live on campus in dorms and eat with their friends in dining halls. They see their parents only once a month. Most of their classes are college level, literally, which they take on the adjacent campus of Western Kentucky University. “We see ourselves as an atypical high school. We’re trying to break the mold of what high school could be,” says Tim Gott, who directs the school’s academic programs.</p><p>Gatton was designed under the Early College Model, a concept devised by researchers at the University of North Texas (UNT) in the 1970s. They wanted to end traditional high school after tenth grade to push students into a college environment sooner. “The idea was to zip them through the educational process,” says Richard Sinclair, one of the early researchers of the model. Sinclair now runs the Texas Academy of Math and Science, a school similar to Gatton, albeit twice it’s size, that’s located on the UNT campus. About seven schools exist under the model, most of them in the south. Despite the high cost—Gatton’s yearly budget for 126 pupils is $2.6 million—state legislatures tend to like the idea because it gets hungry minds out of school faster, turning them into taxpayers and industry leaders.</p><p>To understand just how different Gatton is, try to name another high school that has a living room. Or students who have pet names for their math classes (multi, diffie). Some high schoolers pin posters with the latest movie or heartthrob; in one break room at the end of Gatton’s dorm hall is a floor-to-ceiling crossword puzzle—the one from SkyMall magazine—that’s about half full. When NEWSWEEK visited last week, senior Jordan Currie picked up the clue list. “370 across is kingdom!” she shouted. “Someone fill it in!”</p><blockquote class="quote"><p><p>Of seven Gatton students who agreed to be interviewed, all said they wouldn’t stop studying until they had their PhDs. Some are already on their way.</p>
</p></blockquote><p>Ambition, in other words, is a sort of currency, and the only one that really matters. In the five years since the school opened, some of its students have already completed law school, begun dentistry and pharmacy programs, and started doctoral degrees. (The school’s everybody-knows-your-name mentality has already produced seven marriages.)</p><p>Of seven students who agreed to be interviewed, all said they wouldn’t stop studying until they had their PhDs. Some are already on their way. Andrea Eastes, who graduated this year, spent her senior year studying DNA, specifically in pursuit of a cure for tuberculosis. “Everything you need to take tissue cultures is in here,” she says matter-of-factly, just a few steps away from a canister of liquid nitrogen.</p><p>Gatton has its share of the usual adolescent issues, too. Some students stress over their studies, others over friends and romance. The school employs a full-time school psychologist to work through these issues, and occasionally more serious ones too, like broken families or eating disorders. “Every student comes to me for something,” says Christopher Bowen, Gatton’s Converse-wearing psych counselor. “It’s almost like, if you’re not coming to see me, then we think something’s wrong.”</p><p>Gatton has received nods from high places. Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s minority leader, stopped by once to marvel; when he got back to Washington, he submitted a statement into the congressional record exalting the school.</p><p>But Gatton’s administrators admit it’s not a model for every school. You need to have students who really want to excel before you can turn them into Steve Jobses. Unlike Gatton, most schools have stragglers.</p><p>The key, says Gott, the school’s director and a longtime public school teacher, is to add relevance to education. Maybe every student can’t study advanced engineering, but there&apos;s something—from music to metalworking—that interests every young person and answers the &quot;when will I ever use this?&quot; question.</p><p>What’s more, infusing more glory into education couldn’t hurt. “Everywhere in this country we celebrate basketball and football talent,” says Julia Roberts, the school’s executive director, who petitioned the Kentucky statehouse for 10 years to invest in Gatton. “The talent we really need to celebrate is math and science.</p>http://www.newsweek.com/newsweek-ranks-kentucky-academy-americas-top-high-school-64899Sun, 20 May 2012 11:00:00 -0400America’s Best High Schools 2012: How We Compiled the Listhttp://www.newsweek.com/americas-best-high-schools-2012-how-we-compiled-list-64857
<p>To compile the <a href="/content/newsweek/2012/05/20/america-s-best-high-schools.html">2012 list of the top high schools in America</a>, <em>Newsweek</em> reached out to principals, superintendents and other administrators at public high schools across the country. In order to be considered for our list, a school had to complete a survey requesting specific data from the 2010-2011 academic year. In all, more than 2,300 schools were assessed to produce the final list of the <a href="/content/newsweek/2012/05/20/our-report-card-on-the-1-000-that-make-the-grade.html">top 1,000 schools</a>.</p>
<p>We ranked all respondents based on the following self-reported statistics from the 2010-2011 school year, listed along with their corresponding weight in our final calculation:</p><p><b>Four-year, on-time graduation rate (25%):</b> Based on the standards set forth by the National Governors Association, this rate is calculated by dividing the number of graduates in 2011 by the number of ninth graders in 2007, plus transfers in and minus transfers out. Unlike other formulas, this does not count students who took longer than four years to complete high school. We accepted 2010 graduation rates from districts that had not yet calculated their 2011 numbers.</p><script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" src="http://admin.brightcove.com/js/BrightcoveExperiences.js"></script>
<div class="brightcove section">
<div class="brightcoveObject" style="width:472px;min-height:310px; margin: 0 auto;" >
<object id="1653148262001" name="myExperience1653148262001" class="BrightcoveExperience" >
<param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF" />
<param name="width" value="472" />
<param name="height" value="310" />
<param name="playerID" value="889778564001" />
<param name="playerKey" value="AQ~~,AAAAAAEDRq0~,qRcfDOX2mNu3MBQVberx3rCXi0MGsF8M" />
<param name="isVid" value="true"/>
<param name="isUI" value="true"/>
<param name="dynamicStreaming" value="true" />
<param name="autoStart" value="false" />
<param name="mute" value="false" />
<param name="@videoPlayer" value="1653148262001" />
<param name="wmode" value="opaque" />
<param name="includeAPI" value="true"/> <!-- include the SMART player API -->
<param name="templateLoadHandler" value="dailybeast.video.onPlayerLoaded"/>
<span property="media:title" content="America’s Best High Schools 2012: How We Compiled the List" />
<span property="media:width" content="472" />
<span property="media:height" content="310" />
<span property="media:type" content="application/x-shockwave-flash" />
<span property="media:region" content="*" />
<span property="dc:description" content="Newsweek and The Daily Beast compared the quality of education among the nation’s top secondary schools. Here’s how we did it." />
<span property="dc:subject" content="" />
</object>
</div>
<script type="text/javascript">brightcove.createExperiences();</script><p><b>Percent of 2011 graduates accepted to college (25%):</b> This metric reflects the proportion of graduates who were accepted to either a two- or four-year college for matriculation starting the fall after graduation.</p><p><b>AP/IB/AICE tests per student (25%):</b> This metric is designed to measure the degree to which each school is challenging its students with college-level examinations. It consists of the total number of AP, IB, and AICE tests given in 2011, divided by the total enrollment in order to normalize by school size. AP exams taken by students who also took an IB or AICE exam in the same subject area were subtracted from the total.</p><p><b>Average SAT and/or ACT score (10%)</b></p><p><b>Average AP/IB/AICE exam score (10%)</b></p><p><b>AP/IB/AICE courses offered per student (5%):</b> This metric assesses the depth of college-level curricula offered. The number of courses was divided by the total enrollment in order to normalize by school size.</p><p>Data for each of these indicators were standardized using z-scores, in order to measure the relative performance of each school, and then weighted as indicated above to produce an overall Newsweek score for each school.</p><p>Our analysis excluded newly-founded schools that did not have a graduating senior class in 2011. All submissions were screened to ensure the data met several parameters of logic and consistency. Schools whose submissions did not meet these standards and/or appeared to have incorrect data were contacted directly for clarification. Those that did not respond with corrected data within the specified timeframe were not considered in the ranking process.</p>http://www.newsweek.com/americas-best-high-schools-2012-how-we-compiled-list-64857Sun, 20 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400